305.4: Educating medical students about Organ Donation and Transplantation in Mongolia.

Abstract

Background: Donor law was revised and enforced since February 2018. As per the current law opt-in scheme that presumes 25 years old citizen can give his/her donor consent via written form. Organ transplantation started in 1996 and now have kidney and liver transplantation programs at the First Central hospital and National cancer center. As of 30 April 2019, local doctors performed 180 kidney, 84 liver and 17 bone marrow transplantation successfully. Brain death donation started in 2008, however general population still do not know about it fully. Therefore, we aimed to educate our current medical students on organ transplantation, donor consent form and brain death donation. Objective: To teach structured classroom education on organ donation and transplantation among students in medical universities, colleges in Ulaanbaatar. Within this approach we chose a total 13 medical universities. By the end of the this year over 5,000 college students who will be attending in formal education and promotion program. Methods: In this structured classroom education will cover the basic information about organ transplantation, donor card, brain death donor determination, donation and Istanbul Declaration. The our target 4, 5 and 6th year medical students will be given a 45 minute lesson with accompanying brochure about the donor legislations, transplantation program, data, benefits of organ and tissue donation. Post intervention questionnaire survey will conducted after a month to evaluate the effectiveness of the lesson and its promotion purpose. The questionnaire consists 12 questions of 4 sections. All questions related to donor consent form, organ transplantation program, cadaver donor status, family approach and media involvement in organ donation and transplantation. Results: We started classroom training from 5th and 6th year 460 medical students in April. Students were very keen to gather correct information and had high interest to share their knowledge with their families and friends. It was very obvious that educational intervention increased the knowledge of the students about organ transplantation, donation and legislation. Conclusions: In order to improve our current public education and promotion on organ donation and transplantation, especially brain death donation we started this program from medical university students. Based on our experience this classroom education exposure had good potential to increase knowledge levels of organ transplantation and brain death donation among students. Those 5,000 students can provide the correct information to their family members, friends and communities. Also, we can continue classroom education for the 2nd and 3th year of medical students in 2020.