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Crossing the wide gap between positive attitude towards blood donation and its poor practice among university students: can knowledge and demographic characteristics help?!

Journal of Public Health volume 27, pages 329–337 (2019)Cite this article

Abstract

Aim

Egypt suffers from a continuing shortage of blood supply. University students constitute a significant portion of healthy potential blood donors. Due to lack of evidence, we investigated the knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) of Minia University students with regard to blood donation.

Subjects and methods

We conducted a cross-sectional study which included 576 randomly selected students at Minia University, Egypt aged 20–25 years. A structured questionnaire assessed the KAP, with its related factors. Logistic regression analysis was used to calculate the odds ratios for students’ KAP across different levels of sociodemographic characteristics.

Results

While 65% of the students had positive attitude towards blood donation, 53% of the students had insufficient knowledge about blood donation, and only 35% of them had donated blood before. Age and residence were not significantly associated with KAP, while donors have a multivariable-adjusted OR (95% CI) = 0.37 (0.26–0.54) for being female students versus being males. Studying public health was associated with knowledge and attitude, but not with practice of blood donation. A 1-point increment in knowledge score was associated with significantly 18 and 11% higher odds for having positive attitude and for being a donor respectively. However, the increased likelihood of donating created by having a positive attitude was insignificant.

Conclusions

There was a gap between attitude, on one hand, and knowledge and practice, on the other hand, of Egyptian university students with regard to blood donation. Collaborations between Ministries of Health and Education to facilitate and encourage blood donation practice for students at their place of study are required.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the students who participated in the study.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Minia University, Main road, Shalabyland, Minia, 61511, Egypt

    Ehab S. Eshak, Eman R. Ghazawy, Tarek A. Abd-El Rahman & Shaimaa M. Hafez

  2. Public Health, Department of Social Medicine, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Yamadoka, 2-2 Suita-shi, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan

    Ehab S. Eshak

Authors
  1. Ehab S. Eshak
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  2. Eman R. Ghazawy
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  3. Tarek A. Abd-El Rahman
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  4. Shaimaa M. Hafez
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ehab S. Eshak.

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Conflicts of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Minia University Research Committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all students included in the study.

Additional information

The original version of this article was revised: Due to miscommunication in the terms of using the first dataset, a correction to the list of authors is required: The family name of the third author should be Abd-El Rahman instead of Elareny.

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Eshak, E.S., Ghazawy, E.R., Abd-El Rahman, T.A. et al. Crossing the wide gap between positive attitude towards blood donation and its poor practice among university students: can knowledge and demographic characteristics help?!. J Public Health (Berl.) 27, 329–337 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-018-0954-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-018-0954-0

Keywords

  • KAP
  • Cross-sectional
  • Voluntary non-remunerated blood
  • Egypt
  • University students