Knowledge, Attitude, Practices, and Factors Associated with Voluntary Blood Donation among Graduating Class Students of Assosa University, Benishangul Gumuz, Ethiopia, 2018

Background: Blood transfusion is a vital therapeutic approach in modern health care that saves millions of lives, but there is a great challenge to gate sufficient voluntary blood donation in developing country like Ethiopia at the same time pregnancy and child birth related problem, rod traffic accident, malaria-related death is high. Methods: Institutional based cross-sectional quantitative study was used from April 27 to May 11, 2018, and data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire. A stratified sampling method was used and an individual was selected by simple random sampling within each stratum. EPI data version 3.02 for data entry and SPSS version 16 for analysis was used both bi-variant and multi-variant analysis was computed and significance was declared at AOR <0.05. Results: From the total study participants, 162(48.5%) had adequate knowledge, 230(68.9%) of the respondent had favorable attitudes towards blood donation whereas only 85 (25.4%) have ever donated blood in their lifetime. Having inadequate knowledge 3.118 times more likely non-donors [AOR=3.118: 1.775, 5.479] than compared to those having adequate knowledge, and unfavorable attitude 4.254 times non-donors [AOR=4.254%CI: 1.996, 9.069] than compared to those having a favorable attitude. Whereas being a user of television 2.015 times more likely non-donors of blood [AOR= 2.015 %CI: 1.100, 3.690] than compared to non-user. Conclusion: the result shows that there was poor habit of blood donation practice among students and even from donors above the mean range 57.6% of respondent donate blood to help relatives or friends and we recommend further study in this area, to give training for blood bank service workers and organize motivational blood donor club to utilize potential voluntary blood donors.