ARE HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AGEIST? INSIGHTS FROM AUSTRALIAN SURVEY OF SOCIAL ATTITUDES

There is widespread belief and evidence from clinical practice that health professionals are implicitly and explicitly ageist in their dealings with older people. However, apart from hospital and health-systems reviews, there are few large-scale population-based studies that have explored this issue across age-cohorts. The data for this paper comes from two consecutive waves of the Australian Attitudes to Ageing (AAA) module of the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), conducted in 2009–10 (n=1520) and replicated in 2015–16 (n=1211). AuSSA is a cross-sectional, nationally-representative postal survey of adults (>18 years).