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Perceived educational needs in geriatric medicine of professionals: a multinational multilingual open online survey

Purpose To assess perceived overall knowledge in geriatric medicine and perceived educational needs in key geriatric topics and skills of health and social care professionals working within the WHO Region Europe. Methods The sample of this cross-sectional survey was not designed to be nationally representative. We analysed the responses of 5425 professionals who completed a multilingual multinational open online survey between October 2023 and June 2024. Professionals rated their perceived knowledge, the relevance to their profession and their interest in further training in each of 33 geriatric topics or skills, from "very low" (scored as 1) to "very high" (scored as 5). We computed a global topic score as “relevance + interest – knowledge" for each topic and Z-scored it. Higher Z-scores indicated higher educational needs. Results Professionals' mean age was 42.6 years (standard deviation 11.9); 3942 (72.7%) were women; 3273 (60.3%) worked in the EU-27. The most represented categories were medical doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, and physiotherapists. Perceived overall knowledge varied by country of work and profession. The perceived educational needs Z-scores varied from 1.45 to – 2.57, with the highest being observed for chronic pain (1.45), comprehensive geriatric assessment (1.20), management of behavioural and psychiatric symptoms of dementia (1.19), assessing capacity to consent (1.07), and resilience and diversity and depression (both 1.05). Conclusion To our knowledge, this is the first multinational multilingual online survey on perceived educational needs in geriatric medicine of a large number of professionals from multiple disciplines. Our findings should inform harmonized curricula and continuing education programmes.