An analysis of the awareness, mindset, and etiquette about blood donation among blood donors at a tertiary care center in Western Maharashtra: An observational study.

BACKGROUND

Knowing donor concerns, misconceptions, and attitudes toward blood donation helps us to formulate appropriate donor motivation strategies. Knowledge, attitude, and practice studies are commonly used to investigate various aspects of human behavior, like assessing what people know about blood donation, how they feel about it, and what they actually practice based on their knowledge and attitude.

AIM: The aim of our study was to evaluate various factors such as reasons for donating/not donating blood, sources of knowledge, motivating/demotivating factors, and the impact of peer structure on potential donors.

SETTINGS AND

DESIGN

The study was done at the blood center of a tertiary care health setup. It was a cross-sectional observational study.

MATERIALS AND

METHODS

The study was conducted with 500 participants through an organized, self-directed questionnaire which was shared through printed sheets and in Google Sheets format.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS USED: The data were tabulated into an Excel sheet and analyzed through SPSS software. Chi-square test and general linear models were used to assess the association between various aspects of the participants.

RESULTS AND

CONCLUSION

Out of 500 participants, 80.4% were males with a mean age of 31.3 ± 7.9 years. 98.8% of participants were aware of their blood groups, 'O' being the most common one. 91.4% were unaware of the minimum weight requirement for blood donation. 7.2% were not ready to donate to strangers in need of blood and 25.8% believed they should be given remuneration for their donation. 99.4% had a positive attitude toward donation, but 1.4% were not ready to donate in the future. 16.8% had a fear of getting infected while donating blood and 15.6% were unsure about it. All these findings point out that proper knowledge and communication about the whole blood donation process will certainly help to maintain a prosperous voluntary blood donor program.