Public Knowledge and Attitude Toward Organ Donation in Tianjin, China

Abstract

Objective To investigate the knowledge of organ donation and brain death, attitude toward living and deceased organ donation, and opinion on organ donation, the influencing factors of relevant issue were evaluated in this cross-section study. Methods An original questionnaire was distributed to 6000 respondents (age ≥ 18 years and lived in Tianjin for more than 5 years) who were randomly selected in Tianjin City from November 2015 to January 2016. With the adoption of stratified sampling method and random cluster sampling method, 5868 valid questionnaires (98.7%) were recovered. Results Totally 5868 respondents participated in this study with acceptable knowledge of organ donation but poor acquaintance of legislation situation and brain death. Approximately 74.9% of them expressed the willingness to donate their organs, while 23.4% of them opposed to organ donation. 42.0% of the assentients would donate their own organs to anyone who meet the medical criteria, while 57.0% of them required organ donation designation. A total of 2502 respondents (42.6%) held an open-minded attitude to complete organ-donation consent form when they received the driver’s license. Besides, 57.1% of respondents considered that economic compensation should be offered and the main sources of the compensation should be government funding and special public welfare fund. Multivariate logistic regression model revealed that the age of 40~59 years (OR=1.680 [1.046-2.699], P=0.032; OR=1.741 [1.044-2.903], P=0.034, respectively), annual household income ≥ 20000 yuan (OR=0.656 [0.513-0.839], P=0.001), have the willingness to donate blood (OR=0.324 [0.275-0.383], P<0.001), knowledge of correct conception of brain death (OR=0.823 [0.688-0.984], P=0.033) were the influencing factors of the attitude toward organ donation. Conclusions Public knowledge of organ donation, brain death and available laws were poor. Besides, a tendency that the traditional culture was less common was found.