A Study to Assess the Knowledge and Attitude Regarding Organ and Body Donation Among High School Teachers at Government and Private Rural Schools of Mysuru City with a View to Organize an Awareness Programme

Background of the Study: Organ Donation is one of the most spectacular endeavors till date. Organ Donation from deceased persons has been performed since 1964. Since then, there is chronic shortage for organs and low response to deceased organ donation. Though the first deceased organ transplant was conducted nearly five years ago in Karnataka, such donations still remain a sporadic event in the state.14 Human cadavers for purpose of study are at scarcity with mushrooming of medical institutions in this country. Teaching and research in Anatomy is mainly based on cadaver dissection. The concept of awareness of VBD (Voluntary Body Donation) in large scale is uttermost necessity of the hour.2

Aim: The aim of the is to assess the knowledge and attitude regarding organ and body donation among high school teachers at government and private rural schools of Mysuru city with a view to organize an awareness programme.

Methods: In the study Descriptive study design is used and Cluster sampling technique was adopted to select 120 high school teachers from government and private rural high school of Mysuru city. Pilot Study was conducted, the tool and study design were found to be feasible. The knowledge and attitude level was measured by using structured knowledge questionnaire and attitude scale .The tool was validated by experts and reliability was established by test-retest method. Awareness programme was conducted to all samples. The data was collected and analyzed by using Descriptive and Inferential statistics.

Results: Results of the study revealed that, the majority of the high school teachers had average knowledge and positive attitude regarding organ and body donation. Correlation coefficient between knowledge and attitude (r=0.98) scores was significant at 0.05 level inferring that knowledge and attitude are interrelated. Chi square value to find the association between knowledge and attitude with their selected personal variables showed that no selected personal variables were associated with the knowledge level of high school teachers and only gender had significant association with the attitude level of the high school teachers regarding organ and body donation.

Conclusion: The findings of this study and literature supports the need for multiple health education strategies and campaigns to rural people as there is huge shortage of organs and cadavers. It is essential to stress the need to motivate high school teachers through them to their young students and to the community to attend more awareness programmes and to register themselves to donate organs and their body. A media campaign to increase knowledge and change the attitudes of rural high school teachers is imperative.