Role of intensive care nurses on guiding patients’ families/relatives to organ donation

Abstract

Objective: The aim was to determine the role of intensive care nurses on guiding the families/relatives of brain-death patients to organ donation.
 Methods: This research is a descriptive study. While the population of the study consisted of 1710 nurses working in the intensive care units of public, private and university hospitals in the city of Istanbul, the sample consisted of 353 intensive care nurses selected with stratified random sampling method from the probability sampling methods from this population. The data were collected by using “Data Collection Form”.
 Results: It was determined that 74.5% of the intensive care nurses carefully listened the family/relatives of the patient with possible brain death or suffering from brain death and supported them to express their emotion and thoughts clearly; when the family/relatives of the patients hospitalised in the intensive care unit wanted to get information about organ donation, 20.7% of the nurses made the preliminary explanation themselves and then guided the patient to an organ transplant coordinator for detailed information and 3.1% of the nurses generally gave this information themselves.
 Conclusions: It was determined that the knowledge of the intensive care nurses about brain death and organ donation was partially adequate and the function of guiding the families/relatives of brain-death patients to organ donation was mostly done by the physician.
 doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.35.4.1285
 How to cite this:Karaman A, Akyolcu N. Role of intensive care nurses on guiding patients’ families/relatives to organ donation. Pak J Med Sci. 2019;35(4):---------. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.35.4.1285
 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Experiences of Intensive Care Unit Nurses in Caring for Brain-Dead Donors

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Awareness regarding organ transplantation among visitors of the ICU patients in three tertiary care centres in Kathmandu, a cross-sectional study

“…For any transplant program to be successful, awareness and positive attitude regarding organ donation is essential. [7][8][9] Inadequacy of organ procurement from cadaver is a major problem worldwide, more so in developing countries. In order to increase the rate of deceased donor organ transplant, it is very important to determine the patients who are terminally ill or have the possibility of brain death and prepare the patient's family for the process of organ donation.…”

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