The Effect of Education on the Knowledge, Attitude, and Performance of nursing faculty students towards organ transplantation

The knowledge, attitude and performance of healthcare specialists, including students, concerning organ donation play an important role in promoting organ donation because they can share their information with their friends and families. This research intended to determine the effect of education on knowledge, attitude and performance of students towards organ transplantation.  This semi-experimental research was conducted on 150 students with a pre-test and post-test design. The studied samples were randomly divided into two test groups (75 people) and control (75 people).The participants’ knowledge, attitude and performance of students were investigated before and one month after the educational program that consisted of three 2-hour sessions of lecture, PowerPoint slides, and pamphlets as educational tools. A questionnaire containing items on demographic information, knowledge, attitude, and performance regarding organ transplantation was used for date collection purposes. The data were analyzed in SPSS 18 using chi-square and independent t-tests. The p-values less than 0.05% were considered significant.Before the intervention, there were no significant differences in mean scores for knowledge (p=0.7), attitude (p=0.4), and performance (p=0.6) toward organ transplantation between the two groups. However, after the intervention, there were significant differences between the two groups in the mean scores for knowledge (p-value <0.05) and attitude (p-value <0.05) whereas no significant differences were observed between them in the mean score for performancee regarding organ transplantation (p-value>0.05).   The findings revealed that the educational program improved the students' knowledge of organ donation as well as their attitude towards it. However, because there was no increase in the mean score for performance of the test group, it is recommended that a concerted effort be made to provide organized educational programs while also continuously assessing the efficacy of the content of these programs in order to improve performance toward organ transplantation and increase organ donation.