Results of an awareness Study conducted by three enthusiastic students with specializing in Media, Pharma and Law who won an award with Consumer’s India as one of the top three best researched papers.

Background and Methods:-

This was a short piece of research to examine the knowledge, attitude and practices in organ donation. A total of 100 persons using the snowball technique were selected from various backgrounds: urban, rural, educated, uneducated/school dropouts were included. These could be employed privately or publically. These interviews took place over a period of 7 days of July 2014. The areas covered were New Delhi/NCR, Agra, Hisar, and Jaipur, We conducted these interviews using a set questionnaire through phone calls and face-to-face meetings. We limited the age range between 22-33 years.

Results :-

Out of 100 people sampled 94% had heard of the concept of Human Organ Donation

71% agreed that they would donate their organs. 20% were not sure and just 9% refused.

60% accepted that they had heard about the concept cadaver donation while 34% had not heard and 6% were not sure.

51% did not know about the process involved on how to become a cadaver donor and 11% were not sure how to register to be a donor, where to register and how to get a donor card.

32% had concerns that if they became an organ donor their organs would be misused while 38% had no such concerns and 30% were not sure

We asked people if they believed that organ donation is an act of donation without a reward. 77%, the majority, agreed that they would donate without expecting anything in monetary terms. The concept of organ trafficking was known by 92% of those in the interview and 91% also felt it should be banned.

Conclusion

It was heartening to see from this study that 94% knew about a concept related to organ donation, 60% knew about the concept cadaver donation and 71% would actually register themselves to be organ donors. These results are evidence to the fact that positive intention towards organ donation exists. However, there is a need to convert this into positive behavior so that the demand and supply gap for organs can be met.

Since 51% were not aware about the process involved with being an organ donor, it is obvious that there is a need to build on this awareness through media, education, government involvement and definitely to have in place a transparent system.

Kindly Contributed by Palak, Inderjot and Niyamat