VCU Awarded NIH Grant to Test Intervention to Raise Solid Organ Donation Consents

By Sathya Achia Abraham

The Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine has received a $3 million National Institutes of Health grant to test a new intervention that could increase the rate of consent to solid organ donation.

In the United States, the major source of donor organs is from deceased patients, but consent from family members has remained relatively low. No more than 60 percent of the families of donation-eligible individuals consent, and there is a critical need to increase organ and tissue donations.

Laura Siminoff, Ph.D., a nationally recognized expert on health communication and decision making in disease treatment at VCU, will lead the five-year grant designed to test the efficacy of a two-part Early Referral and Request Approach intervention by assessing hospital procurement barriers and by teaching effective communications skills to workers at organ procurement organizations.

The goal of the program is to raise consent rates to solid organ donation from the families of deceased patients at the point where requests are made by organ procurement organizations.

“We hope to make a difference and increase the rates of organ donation by understanding the barriers faced by hospitals in the procurement of organs, and arming those who communicate with families who have lost a loved one with the skills and sensitivity to discuss organ donation,” said Siminoff, who is professor and chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the associate director of the Cancer Prevention and Control research program at the VCU Massey Cancer Center.

In the first part of the study, Siminoff and her team will test the effectiveness of a barrier assessment program that would improve the timeliness with which a hospital notifies an organ procurement agency of a potential donor. The second part of the study is designed to teach communication skills to improve the effectiveness of organ procurement organization requests to donor-eligible families. The study will include eight organ procurement organizations, located throughout the United States, and their coordinators who request organ donation.

The team will determine the effect of the training modules on consent rates. Furthermore, they will test organ procurement organization’s implementation of the modules under two conditions - a completely autonomous condition in which an organ procurement organization does not employ any outside assistance to implement the module, and an assisted method whereby trained outside consultants play a role in implementing the modules.

According to Siminoff, the Early Referral and Request Approach is based on 15 years of prior research in the area of obstacles to organ donation.