Abstract

 Background and Objectives

  To prepare safe and adequate blood supply to meet patients’ needs and ensure a sufficient number of regular blood donors, knowledge about factors encouraging people to donate blood regularly is essential. Considering its importance, we aimed to survey positive and negative motivation for blood donation.

  Materials and Methods

  This survey was a cross-sectional research with a multiple questionnaire to study the positive and negative motivation toward blood donation in the first half of 1382 (according to Iranian calendar) in Shiraz Blood Transfusion Center.

 Results

  This survey was conducted on subjects with positive motivation who referred to blood transfusion center at the mean age of 32.73 ± 9.6. 92.1% of the subjects were male, and 7.9% female, and 74.3% married. Positive motivation for blood donation included altruistic causes (65.3%), check-up purposes (12.9%), income-earning goals (8.9%), the positive impact of donation on health (8.9%), and curiosity about blood donation (4%). The mean age of the subjects with negative motivation was 25.22 ± 7.54. 22.7% were male, 77.3 female, and 67.7% single. The most important negative motivation was dizziness and faint (45.5%), and lack of time (4.5%). Negative motivation in women was statistically more significant than men (p<0.05).

 Conclusions

  In this study, the main positive motivation for blood donation came out of altruistic reasons, which are considered to be very positive. 12.9% of people just donated for check up that can endanger blood safety.The most important negative motivation was fear of dizziness and faint or disease as a result of donation. This can be removed through holding educational programs and providing sufficient care for donors.

 Key words: B lood donors, Blood donation, Attitude