Knowledge and attitude towards body donation among students in Huye campus, University of Rwanda

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Body donation is the willingness of a person to donate his body or organ to a person or organization after death. Medical schools in Western countries depend solely on human donations for medical education. However, the trend is different in Africa due to limited literature. This study aimed to measure the level of knowledge and attitude toward body donation among students at the Huye campus, University of Rwanda METHODS: A cross-sectional study involving 120 students at the Huye campus of the University of Rwanda. Data was collected using a Google format questionnaire. Knowledge and attitude were assigned scores of 0 and 1 for wrong and correct options, respectively. Knowledge of body donation was calculated as the sum of the scores of all knowledge questions, and Attitude was assessed as the mean of the sum of attitude scores. The association of age, knowledge, and attitude was assessed in bivariate analysis with the Chi-square test. The threshold for statistical significance was P ≤ 0.05 with 95% confidence intervals. RESULTS: 49.2% of the respondents had a very good knowledge score, 43.3% had a good knowledge score, 6.7% had a fair knowledge score, and 0.8% had a poor knowledge score. The positive attitude score was 85.8%, and the negative attitude score was 14.2%. However, 66.7% of the respondents showed an unwillingness towards body donation, and 84.2% showed a willingness towards organ donation. CONCLUSION: The unwillingness to donate body organs observed in this study calls for the introduction of sensitization programs or courses on body donation at the tertiary level of education in Rwanda.