Impact of educational profile on eye donationintention: An empirical study

Since students are the major stake holders of eye donation, attitude towards eye donation and transplantation is a prerequisite for successful eye banking programmes, surveys need to be done for assessing the attitude of the students of all disciplines of universities prior to implementing awareness programmes.

To assess the differences in attitude of healthstream and engineering students towards corneal donation:

Cross-sectional study.

999 students that included 571 health science students and 428 of engineering background.

A well-structured pre tested questionnaire was distributed among participants and data was collected through personal contact approach in survey mode. Taking the help of SPSS 20, data analysis was done applying Chi square test, one way NOVA and descriptive statistics.

Percentages of health stream and engineering students willing for donation was thesame (75.98%, 76.16%). Health stream students were more willing to donate when provided with the information of friend or relative, receiving or donating eyes (46%, 35%). Engineering students, more influenced by fact-donated eyes gave good results (54%, 52%). Friendship had an appreciable influence on engineering students (13.49%, 6.22%). Unwilling students differed due to their opinions regarding eye donation awareness (50%, 40%) and results of corneal transplantation (11.8%, 5.1%). Engineering students were pro donor and strongly considered the option of implementing eye donation as optional, at the discretion of the donor only (31.1%, 21.1%).

Entry into a health related stream does not change the basic attitude of students concerning eye donation.