Intention to donate blood and its predictors among adults of Gondar city: Using theory of planned behavior

BACKGROUND: Blood transfusion is a lifesaving procedure when someone encounters severe anemia, accident or injury, surgery, heavy bleeding during childbirth and cancer chemotherapy. The average blood donation rate of Africa is 4.7/1000 inhabitants and Ethiopia is among one of the countries with the lowest annual donation rate which is 0.8/1000 population. This study assessed intention to donate blood on adults of Gondar city administration using the theory of planned behavior. METHODS: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted. The study was conducted on two randomly selected Gondar sub-cities using systematic sampling on a sample size of 524 adults. Epi Data version 3.0 and STATA version 14 were used for entry and analysis of data respectively. Multiple linear regression was carried out to see the association between intention and sociodemographic variables, past donation experience, attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control and with 95% confidence interval and a p-value of less than 0.05 was used to detect statistical significance. RESULTS: A total of 515 respondents participated in the study giving a response rate of 98%. Most of the participants were females (66.4%) and the participants’ age ranges from 18 to 65 years. The variance explained by the model was 49%. The mean intention to donate blood was 3.02±1.13. Direct perceived behavioural control (β = 0.14, CI (0.04, 0.23)), direct subjective norm (β = 0.11: CI (0.04, 0.17), direct attitude (β = 0.03; CI (0.01, 0.06)) and past behaviour of blood donation (β = 0.3; CI (0.07, 0.51) were significant predictor of intention. CONCLUSION: Theory of planned behavior could be successfully applied in determining adult’s blood donation intention. Predictors of intention to donate blood were past experience of blood donation, direct subjective norm, direct perceived behavioural control and direct attitude. None of the external variables predict blood donation intention.