title: Impact of preclinical exposure to organ donation on knowledge and attitudes of medical students.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Medical students receive little exposure to organ donation and procurement programs.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To describe a student-run elective and its effect on participants' knowledge about and attitudes toward organ donation.
  
  
  METHODS
  Preclinical students interacted directly with donor families, organ recipients, and donation representatives; many participated in an organ procurement with the surgical team.
  
  
  METHODS
  Between 2005 and 2007, 13 students who participated in the elective and a procurement were compared with 72 students who took the elective but did not participate in a procurement and with 22 control students. Students who participated in a procurement wrote reflections about their experience. In 2010, 15 first-year students who participated in the elective and a procurement and 59 randomly selected control students completed a previously validated measure.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Themes included awe, surgical procedures, learning opportunities, and brain death. Regardless of procurement participation, the elective participants from 2005 to 2007 reported higher 4-item knowledge scores (P<.001) than control students reported, but their 4-item attitude scores did not differ (P = .21). The 2010 students did not differ from control students in their number of correct responses to the 20 knowledge questions (P = .48) or their individual responses to each of the 14 attitude questions (all P>.05).
  
  
  RESULTS
  Although elective participants reflected positively on their experiences and professed greater knowledge than control students via a researcher-made tool, these results were not sustained with a previously validated measure. These results point to the need for careful elective design and the need for more accurate measures to study the effectiveness of such interventions.
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, 513 Parnassus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94117, USA. patricia.zheng@ucsf.edu
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.forename: Amanda
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sammann
authors.forename: Mary
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Qiu
authors.forename: Ryan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: O'Sullivan
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Roberts
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D005260:Female; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013337:Students, Medical / Q000523:psychology*; D009927:Tissue and Organ Procurement; D055815:Young Adult