Assessment of Awareness Regarding Blood Donation among Hospital Support Staff in Selected Hospitals, Shillong, Meghalaya

Blood transfusions save lives in various life threatening conditions. Safe blood is one of the critical components in improving health care and in preventing the spread of infectious diseases globally. In Meghalaya, voluntary donations constitute only one third of all blood donations and majority of blood donations is from replacement donors. A cross-sectional study was conducted to assess the awareness regarding blood donation among hospital support staff in selected hospitals, Shillong, Meghalaya by using self-administered questionnaire among 138 participants using consecutive sampling technique. Findings of the study showed that out of 138 participants, maximum i.e., 98 (71.01%) participants have average knowledge regarding blood donation and majority i.e., 136(98.60%) had favourable attitude towards blood donation. However, only 49(35.51%) out of 138 participants had previous history of blood donation, 89 (64.49%) had no previous history of blood donation and the reason stated for not donating blood by maximum participants i.e. 29(32.58%) was “Never approached by anyone to donate blood”. The findings also revealed that majority of the participants i.e.,76(55.10%) had received information regarding blood donation from “Health professionals”. The recommendations of the study is that, a planned awareness program can be conducted for the hospital support staff regarding the importance of voluntary blood donation where the health professionals can also approach hospital support staffs to motivate them to donate blood to facilitate the practice of voluntary blood donation among them to save live