Medical students opinion on corneal donation from members of family

• Grant number: 21/01087-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2021
• End date: June 30, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine
• Principal Investigator: Sidney Julio de Faria e Sousa
• Grantee: Ariovaldo Rodrigues Vilhena Neto
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto (FMRP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Ribeirão Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Attitudes of repudiation of the harvester's team presence are common among doctors who assist the death of a patient, contributing significantly to the reduction in the number of organs for transplantation. That is a universal phenomenon of unknown origin, frequently addressed in the international symposia of Eye Banks, which may be due to a doctor's subconscious interpretation that death represents a failure of the profession with the only plausible reparation being the protection of the family from more suffering as the one represented by the organ donation request. Another conjecture, also associated with the prejudice that the donation request is embarrassing, is that these attitudes originate from ingrained cultural convictions, resistant to conventional medical instruction. This cause would be more amenable to intervention by pedagogical tactics applicable to undergraduate medical education. The alternative to this strategy is the one adopted in the United States in which, instead of trying to find the problem's origin, hospitals are obliged to provide all the necessary means to make the donation request viable despite the medical staff. Therefore, the objective of this work is to probe the opinion of medical students as corneal donors of family members, hoping that this will lead to a better understanding of cultural objections to organ donations by medical professionals.