Hospital health professionals' education about organ and tissue donation: a Turin hospital experience

The culture of organ and tissue donation is not particularly well established among the general population, who often receive incorrect, incomplete information. Unfortunately, even among health workers not directly involved in the field of transplantation (laypersons), there is a poor level of knowledge concerning the underlying principles, mechanisms, and results. To increase lay health workers' knowledge and awareness of the importance of donation and transplantation, we organized an educational session for (nurses, doctors, healthcare workers, technicians, and other professionals) at a hospital coordinating service in Turin. The project was divided into 3 phases: first (February 2010), we performed an initial survey using an instrument containing 18 questions. We sought to assess the level of awareness of hospital personnel. Among 880 distributed questionnaires, 346 were compiled and returned to the authors (39.31%). During the second phase, covering the following 24 months, we held 15 educational courses on the subject of transplantation for 483 participants. In the third and last phase (February 2012), we performed a second survey, distributing, 785 questionnaires identical to the previous one, among which 404 were compiled and returned (51.46%).