Marketing Strategies to Sensitize Organ Donation in Portugal Essay

Introduction

Despite the pervasive public support in organ donation, many countries in the world continue to record low donation rates. Perhaps, this outcome is due to the lack of adequate public sensation concerning the importance of organ donations. As a result, the percentage of people suffering from life-threatening disease and those dying due to lack of donors of transplanting organs continue to escalate. Although Portugal is as one of the leading nations of organ donation in the world, there is a need to conduct further marketing strategies or campaign to improve the number of donations.

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The Historical Data

For an extended period, death was considered an irreversible event, until the organ support system was developed giving the death concept a new definition of brain death (BD). Brain death was defined as the termination of the functioning of the secondary brain due to the irreversible cause. Since then, donors of the dead organs were considered the primary source of transplanting organs. Among the most eligible donors were the victims of ceased heat and BD ICU (Eira, Barros and Albuquerque 1). However, many countries today, acknowledge that donation of organs signal lack of life care to patients who die while in the ICU.

The high rates of costs of health care, mortality, and morbidity are some of the consequences of organ failure. As a result, unavailability of organs required for transplanting is a threatening social and medical issue since transplanting is recognized as the solemn therapeutic alternative for such failure. However, owing to the imbalance between the demand and supply of donated organs, the lists of patients awaiting transplants continue to surge. In 2014, Portugal was placed in position four among the member states of the EU which donated transplanting organs. Accordingly, per very million Portuguese residents, there were twenty-seven donors (Eira, Barros and Albuquerque 1). This ranking followed a successive study to determine whether Portuguese were willing to give organs for transplant.

The rate of kidney transportation activity in Portugal had increased from 46.9 in 2015 to 48 per million population. For the kidney transplanting procedures, the rate had risen from 24.2 to 26.4 per million population in 2015 and 2016 respectively. However, a decline in heart transplanting activities was recorded from 4.9 in 2015 to 4.1 in 2016. There was also a slight decrease in the rate of pancreas transplanting procedures between these two periods from 2.6 to 2.4 per million population. The rate of lung transplanting also increased from 1.5 to 2.5 per million people between 2015 and 2016 (Baron n.p.). However, no transplanting was recorded for small bowels during this period.

Rules and Regulations Relating to Organ Donation

Portugal is among the few world countries which have embraced the presumed consent for organ donation. Due to this presumed consent, Portugal has adopted an opt-out legislative system that sought to intensely amplify the operation of the organ consent rates (Symvoulakis et al. 2). There is an anticipation that the presumed consent legislation (PCL) will result in increased availability of transplants. Some people have also agreed that PCL could increase the number of donated organs. However, they claim that PCL generates ethical dilemmas among professionals offering health care. The resulting conflict between the urgency for more organ donations and the possible health harm to the right of patients become a significant concern (Neades 268). The explicit or opt-in consent system that is ongoing also lowers the number of people consenting to organ donation.

With an opt-in system, a large number of the population has consented to organ donation. The resulting disparities in the number of people, allowing for organ donation between the opt-out system and opt-in method are caused due to the people's perception that the default plan is designed to favor the society and government. According to psychologists, the default plan influences the individual's decision on organ donation. However, the shortcoming of the opt-out system is the belief that some non-willing people are compelled to have their organ removed (Ahmad and Iftikhar 2). Therefore, increasing educative programs concerning organ donation can improve the consent for organ donation.

Due to the existing controversy concerning the nature of consent that necessitates the donation of an organ, Belgium, Norway and Portugal have legislated that for an approval to be presumed to be a valid, evidence on the prior knowledge of the diseased person about the organ donation law must be presented. Where no such evidence that implies consent exists or that the deceased individual had a full understanding of the donation law and was required to record objection or approval, then the removal of organs through the presumed consent illegal (Neades 269). Therefore, according to Portugal's legislation, public education and knowledge are viewed as the primary aspect of the success of organ donation.

Marketing Strategies

Marketing sensation for organ donation involves conducting campaign throughout the year to mobilize people on the importance of encouraging their family members to participate in the donation process. The campaign process consists in promoting public awareness concerning blood and organ donation and transplant as well as supporting public to discuss their donation decisions with friends and families.

Strategy #1: Creative Education

This strategy will involve peer leaders, members of the community, health workers, and individual with the vast social network to increase knowledge on organ donation. Interventions can then be conveyed in churches, beauty salon, and community venues to create strong awareness and willingness to donate (Robinson and Arriola n.p.). This approach provides a fruitful course for delivering donation education that targets a specific community.

Strategy #2: Use of Mass Media

Due to the convincing nature, social media is a potent outlet to be used in offering education related to organ donation, mainly to the minority group. The campaign can be conducted over the social media to promote donation awareness and persuade the minority populations into family notification of donor registration. Past studies have found campaigns which focus on the minority using interpersonal message being more fruitful than those targets the general population (Robinson and Arriola n.p.). Social media platforms used include WhatsApp, Facebook, email, Snapchat, audio records, and video clips.

Strategy #3: Religion and Religious Institutions

Both religious institutions and religious leaders, and religious teachings play a significant role in influencing the lives of people. Evidence has also shown that some religious misperceptions and beliefs are against the registration into organ donations. However, most of the religions believe that organ donation is a show of human love and hence support it (Robinson and Arriola n.p.). Thus, the use of interventions for organ donation with the religion context may provide successful educative strategies.

Strategy #4: Use of National Agencies

The marketing team may seek to partner with Portugal agencies such, Portuguese Transplant Organization (PTO), the ASST National body, Transplant Procurement Management (TPM), and Central Office (ONT) in implementing the national awareness campaign concerning donation and transplanting of organs (International Approaches 8). The agencies can be used as successful interventions for enhancing willingness to organ donation. These bodies have heavily invested in developing such campaigns and hence very essential for this marketing strategy.

Strategy#5: Running "#OrganDonationRegistration" on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Use of tweets and posts can speed up the sensation for organ donation. Also, there is a believed that although a large number of people support organ donation, very few have registered as donors. Therefore, the creation of "#OrganDonationRegister" can serve to harness the generosity of people to life-saving. The good thing with these three social media is that they are cross-generational meaning that conversations related to the awareness of organ donation over these platforms can be can be carried out among parents, children, and spouse. The hashtag campaign can be run over a week, giving the public an opportunity to receive direct responses for their donation-related questions. One of the ways of making the hashtag campaign more effective is by linking a twitter account to a Facebook account. By pairing the two, it becomes effortless to spread the organ donation campaign. It becomes easy to share a tweet and Facebook posts with friends. When an update tweet is made or posted, it automatically appears on the linked Facebook feed (Honeysett n.p.). The hashtag can be used to collect information, makes conversation sociable, interactive, and expressive.

Conclusion

There is a high expectation that by incorporating the five identified marketing strategies, a large number of people will be reached and made aware concerning the relevance of organ donation. For example, use of social media will give the public an avenue to develop online conversation from donation experts, obtain immediate responses to their question and perhaps be convinced to register as organ donors. The marketing strategies aim at harnessing more Portuguese into organ donation and registration to save lives. The donation campaign will run for the second week of every month of the year. The target of the marketing strategy is to increase the number of potential donors and registered organ donors by five percent.

Works Cited

Ahmad, Ghazi, and Sadia Iftikhar. "An analysis of organ donation policy in the united states." Rhode Island Medical Journal 99.5 (2016): 25.

Baron, Christof. "Organ Transplantation Activity in Portugal in 2016". Statista, 2016, https://www.statista.com/statistics/538196/organ-transplantation-activity-in-portugal/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018.

Eira, Carla Sofia Lopes DA, Maria InesTrindade de Barros, and Ana Maria Pina de Albuquerque. "Organ donation: the reality of an intensive care unit in Portugal." RevistaBrasileira de Terapiaintensiva 30.2 (2018): 201-207. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.820.672&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Honeysett, Alex. "Running a Twitter Campaign? 4 Ways to Pick the Right #Hashtag". Themuse.Com, 2018, https://www.themuse.com/advice/running-a-twitter-campaign-4-ways-to-pick-the-right-hashtag. Accessed 31 Oct 2018.

International Approaches to Organ donation Reform. (2013): 1-8 https://donatelife.gov.au/sites/default/files/files/OTA_Fact_Sheets_-_International_approaches_to_organ_donation_reform_November_2013.pdf

Neades, Barbara L. "Presumed consent to organ donation in three European countries." Nursing Ethics 16.3 (2009): 267-282. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.820.672&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Robinson, Dana HZ, and Kimberly R. Jacob Arriola. "Strategies to facilitate organ donation among African Americans." Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology 10.2 (2015): 177-179. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4317752/

Symvoulakis, Emmanouil K., et al. "Shifting towards an Opt-Out System in Greece: A General Practice Based Pilot Study." International journal of medical sciences 10.11 (2013): 1547. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3775113/