Evaluating Organ Donation Decision in ICU Patients' Families by Analytic Network Process Approach

The imbalance between supply and demand for organs has been a global crisis, despite the efforts of transplant coordinators from healthcare institutions to promote donor registration. Because the patient's family has legal rights over the patient's remains, they can easily undermine any efforts spent on organ procurement by simply refusing the patient's consent before death in practice. Most related studies seldom mention the decision-making on organ donation from patients' families. The objectives of this study are to find what are the priorities of those factors acting as the pillars of organ donation by patients' families. This study applied the analytic network process (ANP) to the prioritization factors contributing toward the willingness of families to donate organs of intensive care unit patients. The purposive sampling method used structured questionnaires and ANP questionnaires to enroll 180 patients' families from five intensive care units who met the criteria in the regional teaching hospital of southern Taiwan. Through the ANP analysis, it was found that when family members made organ donation decisions, the weights of the four domains are as follows: psychology—47.6%, externality—20.3%, spirituality—19.7%, and physiology—12.3%. The main decision-making factors that influenced the weighting factors were “attitude” (31.5%), “physician's experience” (0.88%), “religion” (19.3%), and “organ selection” (31.9%). These results could assist organ donation teams to take the best strategies for persuading people to agree with organ donation and formulating an individual organ donation plan.