Analysis of the correlation between blood donation and altruism attitude of nurses: A case study at an education and research hospital

Blood donation means donation of blood by volunteers, without any coercion, to other people in need. Altruism concept can be defined as benevolence and doing good without waiting something in return. When you look at the literature, there are many studies related to the concept of altruism. Continuous research have especially been conducted at occupational groups based on solidarity. The scores have generally been found to be high in research where altruism scale was used. In studies related to blood donation, it was seen that the groups under research were generally highly knowledgeable regarding blood donation but not sufficient in terms of their rate of donation. An important aspect concerning this reluctance in donating blood is the prejudices related to blood donation. Informative explanations and activities provided by ministries and non-governmental organizations via academic research shall aid in mitigating these prejudices and elevate the rate of blood donation. It is considered that health workers in society would have high level of benevolence as well as high rate of blood donation owing to their occupational features. However, since research made in this area is quite scarce, the said argument does not have sufficient basis. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the blood donation behavior and altruism attitude of nurses working at an education and research hospital. For this purpose, Altruism Scale developed by Rushton et al, adapted to Turkish by Tekeş and Hasta, and the Blood Donation Attitude Scale developed by Çelik and Güven have been utilized. The research was conducted at Gülhane Education and Research Hospital and 238 nurses took part in the research. One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVE) and Pearson Correlation analysis was utilized in the analysis of the study. According to the result of the analyses obtained, it was seen that there is a significant correlation between altruism attitude and social-societal responsibility and again a significant correlation between blood donation and societal opinion-understanding. Thus, a positive correlation was seen between blood donation attitude and altruism attitude.