Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice of Voluntary Blood Donation and Associated Factors among Health Care Providers in Addis Ababa health Facilities, Ethiopia

Background: The discovery of blood circulation in 1628 has made an important mile stone in the history of transfusion medicine. Although the first successful blood transfusion occurred in 1818, scientists had put quite a lot of effort earlier than this period. Despite the fact that blood transfusion service has about 200 years of history, there is still a significance shortage of blood and blood products particularly in the developing world. In 2010 the annual blood demand of Ethiopia was estimated to be about 100,000 units per year, yet 44 686 units of blood were collected by the Ethiopian Red Cross Society in the same year. Of which, only 22% were collected from voluntary non remunerated sources. Health care providers could also be a potential source of voluntary blood donation if we encourage them. Objective: to assess the level of knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) of health care providers in Addis Ababa health facilities towards voluntary blood donation and identify the possible determinants of blood donation practice Methods: Facility based cross sectional analytic study was used. To select the participants and determine the sample size, multistage sampling technique with a design effect of two was employed; hence the total sample size became 808 using single population proportion formula. Structured questionnaire which is adapted from other published journals were used. The data collected were cleaned, coded and entered to computer. SPSS version 20 was used for data analysis and management. 95% confidence level with 5% margin of error was tolerated. Result: The level of knowledge determined in this study was found to be good for 72.7% of the respondents. Availability of blood transfusion services within the facility is one of the factors which affect the level knowledge of the participants. 81.7% of respondents have a positive attitude towards blood donation and being male increases the odds of favorable attitude. 32.6% has ever donated blood at least once in their life time yet only less than half of the overall donors are donated blood based on sense of voluntarism. Conclusions and recommendations: although there was a good level of favorable attitude observed in this study, the level of knowledge as well as the practice of blood donation is found to be something that needs attention. Perhaps to create more awareness and sensitization among health care workers to wards voluntary blood donation would be worthy to improve them.