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Higher Motivation but Poor Knowledge of Blood Donation Among Residential Students and Teachers of Religious Institutions in Bangladesh – A Cross-Sectional Baseline Study

The availability of voluntary nonremunerated blood donors (VNRBD) is a major concern in low- and middle-income countries including Bangladesh. There is a substantial paucity of safe blood supply against the expected demand. This study aims to explore the status of knowledge, attitude, and practice regarding blood donation of students and teachers of residential religious academic (RRA) institutions at the community level in Bangladesh.  Religious institutions were selected through simple random sampling and the cross-sectional survey was conducted among 512 participants at Jamalpur district in Bangladesh. Descriptive statistics and stepwise binary logistic regression were performed with statistical significance defined as p < 0.05. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as an extraction method to evaluate a linear KAP relationship regarding blood donation. The results showed that over 90% of the participants were students, non-smokers, and aged 18 to 30 year. The majority (92%) did not ever donate blood to anyone, yet over 42% wanted to be regular donors. More than 80% considered blood donation as a moral responsibility and an Islamic act. The common reasons for not donating blood were lack of knowledge (40%), lack of opportunity (20%), thinking it was harmful to health (21%), being scared of needles (16%), and no financial benefit (5.5%). Interestingly, more than 67% did not know their blood group and about 61 % of the respondents said they did not hear or could not remember about any blood donation program. The participants had poor knowledge of general eligibility criteria but an overall positive attitude towards blood donation. In PCA, two principal components with eigenvalues greater than 1 were retained explaining 77.42% of the total variance. The first component was influenced by knowledge and practice compared to the second component which was largely influenced by attitude. Teachers were more likely to donate blood (AOR: 1.94, 95% CI: 1.03-3.81) and possess good practice behaviour (AOR: 4.79, 95% CI: 2.23-11.92). This research highlights that a large portion of the potential healthy donors is being overlooked although they could be a valuable resource to alleviate the ongoing blood donation crisis. 
 
Funding Information: None to declare. 
 
Declaration of Interests: None to declare. 
 
Ethics Approval Statement: The study protocol was reviewed and approved by the institutional review board of Biomedical Research Foundation, Bangladesh (Ref. no: BRF/ERB/2018/004). Informed written consent was obtained from all the participants, and confidentiality was maintained during and after the data collection.