Testing the Effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Relieving Nurses’ Ageism Toward Older Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

Background Although cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques are well known for targeting psychological distresses, to date, no study has investigated their effectiveness in relieving death anxiety and ageism among nurses. Methods A parallel randomized controlled trial was conducted according to the CONSORT guidelines during October 2019 at the university hospital. A total of 110 nurses were selected through proportional stratified sampling and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The intervention consisted of six two-hour training sessions delivered over five modules with the integration of different CBT exercises. The effect of CBT was assessed by measuring the differences in the students' responses to a series of validated questionnaires of study variables pre-test (before the training sessions) and post-test (after the training sessions). Clinical registration was completed at ClinicalTrial.gov (ID: NCT04319393). Results Overall, using CBT techniques led to significant improvements in the study outcomes. At postintervention, the nurses who had received CBT training had significantly better self-esteem and interpersonal relationships, a greater sense of symbolic immortality, and less death anxiety and ageism than the nurses in the control group. Conclusions CBT is an effective evidence-based psychological intervention for relieving nurses' ageism towards older adults. The psychological well-being of nurses caring for older adults is crucial, and new techniques should be adopted to relieve nurses' accumulated stress and decrease their death anxiety. Future studies which investigate the effectiveness of CBT on other forms of discrimination, such as racism and sexism in healthcare settings, are recommended.

HIV and Aging: Double Stigma

“…Aging sexual stigma may result in a lack of sexual health care for older adults [32]. Nevertheless, cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to reduce ageism among health care providers [33].…”

Anti-Ageism Social Actions: Lights and Shadows

“…Ageism interventions were mostly intergenerational interventions [25,27,35,36], educational programmes [30][31][32]37] and interventions that included both educational and intergenerational contact components [28,29,33]. We also found cognitive behavioural therapy [34].…”

“…Ageism intergenerational interventions demonstrated a significant effect on negative stereotypes about ageing [25][26][27][28][29], attitudes [25,[30][31][32][33][34][35], positive behaviour towards older adults [30], knowledge [33], comfort [35], aging anxiety [27,28], death anxiety [34] and well-being in older adults [26], but no significant effects on working with older adults [30] or in affective attitudes toward older adults [28] were found. Although the Intergenerational Artistic Installation of Madrigal et al [36] found an improvement in younger adults' attitudes toward older adults, but not in younger adults' attitudes toward aging.…”

The effect of extended contact with community‐dwelling older adults on the ageist and helping attitudes of home care students: A single‐blind randomised controlled trial

“…However, it is known that negative ageist attitudes can lead to lower quality of care (Heyman et al, 2020) as well as increased burnout and decreased job satisfaction among care staff (Pekcetin, 2018a). Thus, researchers combat ageism with different methods such as cognitive behavioural therapy (Rababa et al, 2020) or nostalgia (Turner et al, 2018). Therefore, it is important to examine whether training can bring about favourable changes in ageist attitudes.…”