Medical Technologists: Are They Ready to Play Their Fair Share to Facilitate the Organ Donation and Transplantation Process in India?

Abstract

Abstract Background: Organ shortage is a global health crisis. Health-care professionals are supposed to be frontrunners in the campaign for organ donation (OD) by being in a good position to liaise with patients and their families for obtaining consent for the OD process. We propose to highlight the current state of awareness, knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) of Medical Technologists, a burgeoning relatively new branch of allied health professionals, in order to assess their readiness for facilitating OD/transplantation process in India. Objective: We aimed to study the current state of awareness, KAP of OD among Medical Technologists. Methods: A cross-sectional, survey-based study utilizing online Google forms for gathering medical technologist responses was conducted. Two surveys (Part A and Part B) were used to collect the requisite data. 146 and 114 participants responded to Part A and Part B, respectively, out of which 99 answered both surveys. Descriptive statistics using Excel and statistical analysis using SPSS version 22 were carried out. Results: Majority of participants were male (61%) within the 20–30 years’ age group, with 82.2% interacting with patients on a daily basis. The mean awareness, knowledge, death, legal, and attitude score were 4.89 ± 1.55 (54.3%), 3.925 ± 1.9514 (43.8%), 2.123 ± 1.328 (42.6%), 1.798 ± 1.00 (59.9%), and 6.11 ± 4.718 (87.3%) (mean ± standard deviation) (% of mean/total score), respectively. Among participants, 23.7% had already donated or signed donor cards, whereas 30.4% of those not yet donated are willing to donate when asked or sometime in the future. Majority of medical technologists showed positive attitudes leaning toward OD and supported further education and awareness. There was no significant difference in scores between donated versus not-donated groups (P > 0.05); however, attitudes scores were significantly higher for the willingness to donate group among current nondonors (P = 0.002). The death score was higher in the postgraduate group (P = 0.045) and knowledge (P = 0.016) and death scores (P = 0.032) were significantly correlated with educational qualification. Furthermore, medical technologists working in different specializations (i.e. areas of work) possessed significant difference in scores (knowledge (P = 0.003), death scores (P = 0.008), legal (P = 0.028), and attitude (P = 0.01) scores) while specifically legal score was significantly different between genders (P = 0.013). Interestingly, the legal score was associated with and moderately correlated with attitude score (P = 0.437). Knowledge score was associated with daily interaction (P = 0.034), death score was associated with area of work (P = 0.021); and legal score was associated with gender (P = 0.003) and area of work (P = 0.043). Conclusion: Since the medical technologist cadre in India can serve as an important bridge between patients and health-care organizations supporting OD; upgrading their knowledge, converting their attitudes into pro-OD practices, and honing their skills through training interventions to facilitate OD definitely needs to be invested in. Such investments in training interventions/courses implemented now can pay rich dividends in the years to come.