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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). In both survey waves, relatively few of the respondents across all age groups perceived that older people received worse treatment from healthcare professionals compared to younger people (18.6% in 2009–10 & 11.1% in 2015–16). With increasing age, a linear pattern was observed for perceptions of worse treatment within age-cohorts (p<0.01) but gender was not a significant factor. A higher proportion of respondents with tertiary education perceived healthcare professionals treatment of older people to be worse compared to respondents with secondary-school education (45.5% vs 14.1%). Self-reported health status was not a statistically significant factor in the 2009–10 survey, but was significant in the 2015–16 survey with those with poor health reporting more ageists attitudes (p<0.05). Individuals having negative perceptions of ageist attitudes by healthcare professionals may not necessarily get poor quality medical care. However, as with any form of systematic and ongoing prejudice, the effects can be insidious both in relation to physical and mental health.
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