Attitudes to disability of Russian occupational therapy and nursing students

Positive student attitudes toward disability are essential to client-centre d rehabilitation. Instilling such attitudes in students enrolled in the fir st occupational therapy (OT) and post-diploma nursing management (NM) cours es in Russia was a key objective of the curriculum development team. The te am's aim was to combat the traditional Russian attitude of pity, dependence and marginalization. To this end, the introductory classes were developed and taught by teachers from the All Russia Society of Disabled (ARSD). This paper examines the attitudes to disability in Russia and compares the atti tudes of three groups of students. Students in the OT and NM programmes (n = 18) in Volgograd were compared to other nursing students in the same coll ege (n = 21) and to nursing students in a Moscow medical school (n = 20). A ll completed the Scale of Attitudes Toward Disabled Persons (SADP). The Kru skal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U statistics revealed that students in the OT and NM programmes had significantly more positive scores (P = 0.01) than ei ther of the other groups. This suggests that the strategies adopted by the curriculum team were successful in developing positive attitudes in student s.