Do Health Sciences Students Have the Appropriate Knowledge and Attitude to Advance Organ Donation in Ethiopia? Cross-Sectional Study

Background: Donated organs and tissues are necessary for transplantation to treat irrepar-able organ failure. This study aimed to assess the knowledge and attitude of undergraduate health science students ’ toward organ donation at Jimma University. Methods: The study was conducted in Jimma University, College of Health Sciences from February 1, 2018 to April 25, 2018, Gregorian calendar. Data was entered into Epi-Data version 3.1 and exported to SPSS version 23 for analysis. A descriptive and generalized linear model was applied to present the results. Results: The overall knowledge and attitude scores of the students were 3.844 (2.98, 4.712) and 6.3914 (5.93, 6.85) respectively. The results showed that students had good knowledge of and a positive attitude toward organ donation. Male students had a higher mean knowledge score than female students, however, the difference was not signi fi cant. Dental medicine and medicine students had a higher mean knowledge score than any other health science students in the faculty. Students showed knowledge difference yearly. A signi fi cant number of students 290 (73.4%) and 313 (79.2%) knew the importance of live and cadaveric organ donation to treat permanently failed organs, respectively. Also, about 238 (60.3%) students had the awareness of disease transmission and 358 (90.6%) of them knew the involvement of tissue rejection when inappropriate organ transplantation is done to the recipients. Furthermore, likewise, more than half of the students expressed positive beliefs toward the different questions of organ donation-ethics, religion, and willingness for organ donation. Conclusion: Students showed good knowledge and a positive attitude toward organ donation and this should be translated to the public to increase the rate of organ donations.