How African Americans express their intentions to be organ donors

As part of an organ sharing network's outreach, African American adults were interviewed to assess their awareness of the network's efforts and willingness to donate their organs after death.

To describe (1) the proportion who expressed their intentions to be an organ donor, (2) the means they had used, and (3) sociodemographic characteristics of the participants who used a particular means.

A repeated, cross-sectional, random-digit dialing telephone interview was conducted from July 2005 (start of wave 1) to April 2006 (end of wave 3). Each interview averaged 7 minutes and consisted of 60 items.

Trained interviewers placed telephone calls to the residences of African Americans who resided in 1 of 4 New Jersey locales: East Orange/Orange, Irvington, Jersey City/Newark, and Trenton.

One thousand five hundred sixty-seven African Americans, aged 18 to 95 years.

Five Yes/No items were used to determine if participants had declared their intention to be an organ donor via driver's license application, donor card, donor registry, will/healthcare directive, or discussion with a family member.

Twenty-seven percent of the participants had expressed their intentions to be an organ donor with an organ donor card, driver's license, donor registry, or will/healthcare directive. The participants who had used one or more of these formal means were 14.4 times more likely to have discussed their intention to be an organ donor with a family member than were the participants who had not.