13th Congress of the International Society for Organ Donation and Procurement (ISODP)Organ donation strategiesRelationships Between Social Attitudes Toward Deceased Organ Donation and the Donation Rates in Poland, a Country With an Opting-out System

- Monitoring attitudes toward donation does not allow prediction of a person's behavior.
- Consistency of actions and attitudes toward donation has many determinants.
- There is no common pattern of behavior and attitudes toward donation.
- There is no correlation between attitude toward donation and actual donation rates.
- A great variety of individual attitude in the matter of organ donation was documented.

BackgroundMonitoring of attitudes toward deceased donation gives the general view of the acceptance of this treatment but does not allow for precise prediction of single person's behavior. Consistency of actions and attitudes has many determinants, personal and situational. The idea of this study was to assess and compare relationships between behaviors and attitudes toward postmortem organ donation in single districts and between larger regions of the country (west and east).MethodsIndicators calculated for the years 1996-2014 included the number of potential deceased donors (per million population [pmp]/y), the number of objections registered in the refusal registry (pmp), and the number and percentage of family refusals to donation. To assess relationships between variables, statistical and descriptive analyses were used.ResultsThere were 10,731 potential donor referrals: 10 times more in the most active than in the least active province. Potential donor referrals from the western region were almost twice as high (18.3 pmp/y) as from the east (10.1). In 1,045 cases (9.7%), organs were not used owing to objections of the relatives; this index differed in each province up to 7-fold, but was almost the same in western and eastern regions. Total number of objections listed in the Refusal Registry was 28,725 (748 pmp). This index was different in each district up to 4-fold, but was not distinctly different in west and east regions. No distinct correlation (Pearson test) was found among the 3 assessed variables.ConclusionsDonation in Poland has much geographic differences. There is no common pattern of behavior and attitude toward donation and no correlation between these variables.