Grief response and donor request workshop : a revised hospital eye retrieval program and lecturer's kit for eye bank foundation of the Philippines

• Main Authors: Bareng, Bea Maryse L., Casas, Pia Francesca M., Garcia, Chana Marie A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: Eye banks > Philippines; Eye Bank Foundation of the Philippines, Inc; Health Communication; Organizational Communication
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/7358
• Institution: De La Salle University

Eye Bank Foundation of the Philippines (EBFP), established in October 1995, is a non-profit, non-government, and humanitarian organization that owns and operates a medical eye bank named Santa Lucia International Eye Bank of Manila (SLIEB). The Santa Lucia International Eye Bank of Manila [is the] organization is the first and only state-of-the art eye banking facility in the Philippines. The SLIEB is dedicated to the collection, processing, evaluation, storage, and equitable dsitribution of quality corneal and eye tissues for transplant, research, and education. The organization's main advocacy is to give the gift of sight through corneal transplants, and to make this service available to every blind Filipino wherever and whenever it is needed, One of the ways to achieve this goal is to conduct Hospital Eye Retrieval Program lectures to the organization's partner hospitals. The hospital lecture program focuses on the basic information on eye tissue donation and transplantation such as the definition of corneal blindness, donor eligibility, and frequently asked questions by patients. Based on communication audit, however, the hospital lecture program is reported to be ineffective by the nurses. In particular, the hospital lecture program does not help in improving the nurses' communication skills in approaching the potential donor or the family/relatives of the potential donor. The thesis aims to address this organizational communication problem through a revised hospital retrieval lectute accompanied by a lecturer's manual and kit to guide the program lectures of facilitators. Alongside with this, it aims to improve the communivation competence of the nurses in executing the eye referral process through an improved and revised Hospital Eye Retrieval Progam lecture. Being the official eye bank organization in the Philippines, it is important that the Hospital Eye Retrieval Program lecture is conducted systematically and uniformly. Thus, the intervention implemented by the thesis contributed in producing a uniform program lecture of EBFP to help them conduct a more effective training for the nurses of their partner hospitals. Through this, the nurses will learn the necessary communication competence that they need in executing the eye referral process and develop sufficient communication competence as advocates of EBFP. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted in gathering data which was used to improve the thesis and the intervention materials that were produced. Pre-lecture and post-lecture assessment forms were also devised and given out to the participants of the lecture program in gathering data to establish the relationship between the interactivity of the lecture program and the increase in communication competence among the nurses. After comparing the results of the pre-lecture and post-lecture assessments, it was found that the communication competence of the nurses partly increased after attending the revised lecture program. The study found that communication competence of nurses in referring and requesting for tissue donation could be partly attributed to the interactivity of workshops conducted. Through the revised Hospital Retrieval Program, nurses are more enabled to participate, gain confidence in doing tasks, share their insights, reflect and ask questions, know their mistakes and retain information which affects their knowledge in the Eye Bank of the Philippines’ Hospital Retrieval Program. The improvement of the communication competence of the nurses would help them execute and improve their job on approaching potential donor families for corneal donation. The study highlights the importance of standardization of the hospital retrieval lecture program throughout the world. Nurses and other healthcare professionals, who are perceived to be one of the key players in the field of organ and tissue donation, needs to undergo rigorous training on how to communicate with patients or their bereaved families in relation to the topic of organ and tissue donation. The lack of communication competence among these key players was found to be one of the major factors on the decline of organ and tissue donations. Thus, the mandatory state of these educational programs and trainings for nurses and healthcare professionals should propagate the need to improve and develop the current hospital retrieval programs of the hospitals worldwide.