Blood and blood components are important in many situations. To meet the demand of blood in Indonesia, there is on going need to recruit new and retain current donors. Because only a small proportion of eligible donors donate and an even smaller percentage return to give blood a second time, a better understanding of what motivates donors to give blood is needed. Hence, this study was to investigate respondents’ characteristics, motivations of donors to give blood, reasons of not donating blood, knowledge and attitude towards the act of donating blood among the medical students in medical faculty of Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Indonesia.
This study has been designed as a cross-sectional descriptive analytical manner analyzed by using Chi-Square test. Sampling technique chosen was stratified random sampling. A total of 274 respondents were selected in this study. A self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection. The questionnaire was produced after review of the literature on the blood donation.
As a result, we found the knowledge and attitude of the respondents were not significantly correlated with the act of donating blood (p > 0.05). Significance between the respondents’ characteristic and the act of donating blood (p <0.05) pleaded act of donating blood depend on one’s socio-demographic background. We suggest that knowledge on blood donation should be repeatedly taught at any education level or block. This study can provided preliminary result for other studies.
