Abstract

The Relation between the Opinions and Religious Attitudes of the Nursing Department Students on Organ Donation

Purpose: Health employees, especially nurses, play a key role in increasing organ donation because of their communication with patients and their relatives. In this context, the present study was conducted to examine the relation between the opinions and religious attitudes of nursing department students about organ donation.

Method: The study was conducted between March and April 2018 with nursing students of the faculty of health sciences of a state university in the descriptive and cross-sectional design. Before the commencement of the study, permission was received from the ethics committee, institution and students. The universe of study consisted of all the nursing students of the faculty; and the sampling of the study consisted of a total of 659 students who were willing to participate in the study. The data were collected with the questionnaire and religious attitude scale. The scores that can be received from this scale range between 31 and 155 and as the score increases, religious attitude behaviors become positive and negative as the scores decrease. The data were evaluated with the Student t, One-Way Anova, Kruskal Wallis, Mann Whitney U and correlation analysis.

Findings: It was determined that a total of 68.1% of the students wanted to donate their organs, 50.6% said they could donate organs to save lives, 60% of those who did not want to donate their organs did so on the grounds of their religious beliefs and 21.6% of the students who considered to donate their organs did not want to donate their organs to the opposite gender. It was also determined in the study that the average score of the students was 120.9 ± 13.8; and there was a significant relation between their opinions on organ donation and religious attitudes.

Results and recommendations: It was observed that the religious attitude scale average of the students was high; and the majority of those who did not want to donate did so on the grounds of their religious beliefs. In the context of these data, considering the culture, values, beliefs and traditions of the society, it may be suggested to provide informative trainings to raise awareness and interest about the importance of the problem.

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