Organ Donation Interventions Among High Students

Over 74,000 people are actively waiting for a solid organ to improve and extend their lives yet each year the number of deceased donors remains less than 11,000.1 Substantial changes are needed to increase the number of donated organs or many persons in need of a transplant will die without receiving one. The major limiting factor to organ donation remains the low consent rate.2 Increasing consent for organ donation will likely increase both the availability of organs and, by extension, increase the duration and quality of life of those waiting.3,4 While most people who consent to organ donation do so while obtaining their driver's licenses at the bureau of motor vehicles,5,6 the bureau of motor vehicles' staff generally do not have the training to provide sufficient information to answer questions regarding donation. As a result, bureau of motor vehicle patrons may not be receiving the information necessary to allay their fears and concerns sufficiently enough to provide informed consent for donation. We have previously demonstrated that adolescents have concerns regarding organ donation that stem from lack of knowledge about the process and from a paucity of discussions regarding organ donation with their parents.7 We and others have also found that efforts to increase consent for organ donation among adolescents must address altruism regarding donation and the positive effects of donation.8,9. We incorporated these findings into the development of a video intervention tailored towards adolescents. In a community-based randomized trial, we found that the video was effective in increasing consent for organ donation.10 This project incorporated the successful aspects of these multiple organ donation interventions to facilitate consent for organ donation among adolescents.

Our consortium partners, the Cleveland branch of the Minority Organ and Tissue Transplant Education Program (Cleveland MOTTEP), Lifebanc (the Organ Procurement Organization for Northeast Ohio), the Cleveland Eye Bank, and the Kidney Foundation of Ohio, had been collaborating to conduct twice yearly organ donation summits for adolescents for almost 10 years. The summits were 1-day meetings of 100 - 150 students from 5 high schools in Cleveland and the surrounding neighborhoods. The goals of the summits were to increase knowledge and awareness of organ and tissue donation and transplantation, as well as to assist in chronic disease prevention. While the summits have become a mainstay in the community, they have been limited in scope, devoid of a uniform curriculum, variable in execution, and have lacked formal evaluation.

The purpose of this study was to expand on the existing high school education summits by creating and implementing a uniform, validated organ donation curriculum based on successful best practices with integration of successful organ donation video interventions and by rigorously evaluating the effect of the individual and combined components. We employed a 2x2 factorial randomized design to explore the independent and combined effects of the interventions.