Communicating Effectively about Donation: An Educational Intervention to Increase Consent to Donation

Context Families' refusal to consent to solid organ donation is a major contributor to the organ deficit in the United States. Previous research has identified organ procurement coordinators as best able to obtain consent from families; however, few studies have examined the effects of coordinator training programs on consent rates. Objective To test the effects of the Communicating Effectively About Donation intervention on the rate of family consent to solid organ donation. Design A nonrandomized repeated measures design. Setting and Participants Participants included 17 hospitals, 502 donor-eligible patients and their families, and 22 coordinators from an organ procurement organization in Ohio. Intervention Coordinators were given in-service training on the use of effective relational and affective communication techniques through a day-long interactive workshop and simulated donation scenarios. Main Outcome Measures Families' final donation decision and coordinators' donation-related behaviors. Results Training of coordinators was associated with increases in coordinators' comfort speaking with patients' families about donation and answering donation-related questions, in the amount of time coordinators spent discussing donation with family members, and in the number of donation-related topics discussed with families. Consent rates increased from 46.3% to 55.5% after the intervention. Conclusions The results suggest that improving coordinators' communication skills may be a fruitful avenue for increasing the rate of family consent to donation; however, a more definitive test of the training is needed to confirm the intervention's effectiveness.