Association between education about organ transplantation aimed at medical students and the acquisition of the organ donor card. A cross-sectional study.

<p>Background. The transplantation group of the National<br />University of Colombia considers that education about<br />transplants is important to raise the donation rate in this country.</p><p><br />Objective. To find a statistical association between education<br />about transplantation aimed at medical students and the<br />number of students and their families bearing the organ donor card.</p><p><br />Materials and methods. Cross-sectional analytical study.<br />Two surveys were designed and sent to two different student<br />populations. The first group had taken the course “Human<br />Organ and Tissue Transplantation”, and the second group<br />was composed of students from the fifth semester of medical<br />education. The statistical test used was difference of proportions,<br />sample size of 50 people, statistical power of 80%, difference<br />in proportions 20%, alpha 0.05, p &lt;0.05.</p><p><br />Results. The surveys were answered by 29 students from<br />first group and 74 students from second group. First question:<br />“Do you carry the organ donor card?”, p-value of 0.03 found.<br />Second question: “Do your family members carry the organ<br />donor card?”, p-value of 0.732 found. Affirmative answer to the<br />first question, p=0.10 and answer to second question, p=0.0005.</p><p>Conclusion. An association was found between education<br />about transplantation focused on medical students and bearing<br />the organ donor card and communicating their wishes to their<br />families. Likewise, an association between education and a<br />positive attitude toward donation was found in the families of<br />students that participated on the course “Human Organ and<br />Tissue Transplantation”.</p>

Tissue Banking: Relationship with Blood Donor and Organ Donor Card Status

Understanding the relationships among altruistic health acts may serve to aid therapeutic research advances. In this paper, we report on the links between two such behaviours—donating blood and carrying an organ donor card—and willingness to donate urological tissue to a tissue bank. Reasons for the differential willingness to do so are examined in this paper. A systematic sample of 259 new and returning attendees at a tertiary urology referral clinic in Ireland completed a self-report questionnaire in an outpatient setting. In addition to demographic details, details of known diagnosis of malignancy and family history of cancer; attitudes to tissue donation for research purposes were gauged using a 5-point Likert scale. Both blood donors and organ donor card carriers were more likely to be willing to donate tissue for research purposes. Blood donors were more likely want to know their overall results in comparison to nonblood donors and want their samples to be used for nonprofit research. Our hypothesis that being a blood donor would be a better predictor to donate urological tissue than being an organ donor card carrier borne out by the trends reported above.