Care Provider's Knowledge and Attitude Toward Organ Donation in Jimma Town, Ethiopia: Cross-Sectional Study.

Introduction: Ethiopia is a country in sub-Saharan Africa with a population of 100 million people. The incidence and prevalence of end-stage organ failure seems to be a growing health problem in the country. Transplant legislation was drafted years ago by the federal minster of health in Ethiopia, but the number of donors is still low. Thus, we aimed to assess care providers' knowledge and attitude toward organ donation so they will be volunteer advocates for the public to increase organ donation in the country.

Method: A cross-sectional survey was conducted at 3 main higher private clinics and at Jimma University Specialized Hospital (JUSH) in Ethiopia from February 25, 2018, to June 21, 2018. Knowledge measuring questions had 2 possible answers (yes or no). The attitudes domain was measured with an "Agree" and "Disagree" categorical response scale. Data was entered to Epi-Data version 3.1 and exported to SPSS version 21 for Windows (IBM-SPSS Statistics 21, IBM, Armonk, NY) for data analysis. Descriptive statistics and a generalized linear model were used to analyze the data.

Results: In total, 326 care providers were involved in the study. The mean age and service year of the participants were 29.68 (± 4.877) and 4.28 (± 4.561), respectively. The overall weighted knowledge and practices scores were 4.344 (4.214, 4.473) and 5.64 (5.39, 5.89), respectively. Majority care providers had an understanding about brain death and the definition of organ donation. Over half of the care providers agreed to donate organs in the future; additionally, they believed there was no strict association between religion and organ donation. Furthermore, many care providers believed in the advertisement and promotion of organ donation to raise public awareness.

Conclusion: Care providers showed good knowledge and attitudes toward organ donation. The findings may encourage health care workers to provide better counseling to improve organ donation.