The Power of an Immediate Donor Registration Opportunity: Translating Organ Donation Attitudes Into Registration Behavior

ABSTRACT

In Australia, despite numerous campaigns encouraging the registration of organ donation intentions on a National Organ Donor Register, registration remains low. This disparity was investigated by examining the relationship between positive and negative donation attitudes, an immediate versus a delayed registration opportunity, and registration. In a community setting, 200 participants completed a short version of the Organ Donation Attitude Scale and were given either an immediate or delayed opportunity to register. In the immediate condition, 60% registered against 11.6% in the delayed condition despite participants in both conditions having similar attitude profiles, suggesting that attitudes were facilitated or obstructed by the registration opportunity.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge DonateLife, Australia’s national agency dedicated to increasing public awareness about organ donation, and improving outcomes in this field. We also acknowledge Dr. Alison Bowling, the two anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their invaluable comments on this article.

Notes

This figure includes intent registrations by 16- and 17-year-olds.

Information, Immediate and Complete Registration Opportunity, Focused Engagement, and Favorable Activation.

Parisi and Katz’s (1986) original scale contained 46 items. As the scale was too long for the aim of our study, we retained the essence of the scale by keeping 16 items, removing repetitive items or items with outdated or not culturally appropriate language (e.g., “Organ donation is a way to atone for past wrongdoings”; see Table 1 for the 16 items).

Principal Axis Factoring.

Opportunity to register was counterbalanced over the market days held in the City Centre on two Thursdays and at the Harbourside foreshore on two Sundays.

The completed registration forms were sent to the Australian National Organ Donation Register by the DonateLife organ donation nurse.

Pledging to donate an organ after my death would make me feel proud of myself; Organ donation leaves the body disfigured; By donating a body part after my death I could keep another person living.

Due to the small number of respondents who registered in the delayed condition (n = 9), it was not possible to discern why this was.

The authors acknowledge there are caveats associated with using multiple regression analyses. If measures used in Step 1 were perfectly valid, this step may have accounted for all of the variance in Step 2. The size of the correlation in Step 1 may also influence the meaning of ΔR² (Trafimow, 2004). Thus, these results should be interpreted with caution.