Evaluation blood donor behaviour and their perceptions towards blood donation.

Abstract

Blood donor behaviour; retaining blood donors; Altruism in blood donation, perception towards blood donation, recruiting blood donors. No entity In Malta is given permission to collect, test and distribute blood, to any of the hospitals, (state or private) except the blood bank This supply is collected from voluntary non remunerated blood donors. The objective of this study is to find out what motivates people to continue to donate blood and why others opt out. The fact that we have seen an average decline of 3 72 donors per year in the last seven years, together with a large increase in demand, made it necessary to evaluate and analyse why some people (about 6% of people between 17-60 years of age) give blood and others don't. This is necessary, if we want to retain established blood donors and motivate more people to become blood donors. Blood donor behaviour was never evaluated in Malta. Literatures were selected from international studies. A cross sectional study was conducted. The hypothesis of this study states that better recruitment strategies are necessary to retain and motivate donors. A randomly selected week was chosen and the donors attending the blood bank in Malta were asked to participate by filling out a questionnaire. In all, 189 questionnaires were answered. Only 5 participants refused to comply. Another 138 donors who decided not to donate blood again in the last two years were contacted via a fixed telephone line and a similar questionnaire was asked adding a question addressing the reason for their decline to donate blood.

The blood bank in Malta was used for this project and 327 existing Maltese blood donors were asked to participate in this study. Data gained from questionnaires was analysed by means of SPSS version 16. Overall findings indicated that Time constraints, Lack of information and Fear were the main deterrents to blood donation. On the other hand, Appeals and Information together with Altruism were the main factors that participants think are the drivers behind blood donation in Malta. Graphs and Tables demonstrated in the results section gave a clear indication of what should be improved and/ or implemented to improve the existing recruitment and retention strategy thus making it possible to increase our daily collection of blood units. Inferential statistics were carried out and an unpaired T-Test was used to test for significance. In this analysis, it is evident that participants are satisfied with most of the services provided to them by the blood bank.