Clinical screening and donation experience from the blood donor's perspective

Abstract

The aim was to describe the experience of donation and clinical screening from the donor's perspective. This is a cross-sectional descriptive and analytical study, with non-probabilistic sampling, between November 2018 and March 2020. The scenario was a hemotherapy service in Rio de Janeiro. A self-administered questionnaire with 32 questions was used for blood donation candidates. Univariate and bivariate analyzes were performed, a chi-square test was applied, considering a significance level of 5%, using IBM's SPSS software. Of the 400 respondents, 54.8% were donating spontaneously; 71.5% declared to be repeat donors; 36% reported having an interest in the results of serological tests; 88.3% admitted to fully trusting the results of such exams; 65.8% declared they had no knowledge about the health units where they could be carried out; and 59.8% considered transmission of infections possible through transfusion. About repeat donors; 66.4% reported having been asked about vulnerabilities and risk situations in clinical screening; for 38.8%, the opportunity for self-exclusion was not clear. In this context, the nurse has a role both in approaching the donor in clinical screening, as well as in explaining the donation process, to allow conscious decision-making by self-exclusion, based on adequate guidance regarding their vulnerability.