The European Donor Health Care Project: fulfilling needs and challenges for the future

The Donor Health Care project is a EU granted project to develop a learning programme for professionals working in the field of Donor Health Care. The innovation of this curriculum is the focus on all donors, irrespective of whether they donate blood, cells, tissues or organs. This article describes the background of the project and the current possibilities and limitations of European accreditation, distance learning and Master degrees

Project aanstellingskeuringen dossieronderzoek bij de RBB ; Deel II: Panelonderzoek

Dit rapport bevat het laatste deelonderzoek, dat in het kader van het project "Aanstellingskeuringen" is verricht. Het centrale thema is de betrouwbaarheid van de beoordelingen van keuringsgegevens. Voor het onderzoek zijn twee deelgroepen van kandidaten geselecteerd uit de totale groep kandidaten, die door de Rijks Bedrijfsgezondheids- en Bedrijfsveiligheidsdienst, RBB in de jaren 1983-1988 zijn gekeurd. De ene deelgroep bestond uit 90 kandidaten waarvan bekend was, dat deze bij de aanstellingskeuring door de RBB ongeschikt zijn bevonden: de "cases". De tweede deelgroep (90 personen) bestond uit "controles". Het onderzoek is in twee delen gesplitst: de twee deelgroepen zijn vergeleken op het punt van de keuringsgegevens en vervolgens zijn de keuringsgegevens in samengevatte vorm voorgelegd aan een panel van vijf ervaren bedrijfsartsen met de vraag de desbetreffende kandidaten te beoordelen op de geschiktheid voor de functie, waarnaar zij solliciteerden. Uit de resultaten bleek dat de onderlinge overeenstemming slecht is. De in dit onderzoek gevonden lage betrouwbaarheid impliceert dat de validiteit van de aanstellingskeuring niet hoog kan zijn

Agreement on medical fitness for a job

Five experienced occupational physicians independently reviewed the uniformly structured, concise records of 180 applicants who had applied for a job in one of three categories. All had undergone a pre-employment medical examination by the Governmental Occupational Health and Safety Service. Agreement was assessed by calculating the percentage of disagreement and Cohen's kappa. Agreement between the five panel physicians and between the panel physicians and the Service appeared to be poor, with overall percentages of disagreement of 31 and 37%, respectively, and kappa values of 0.38 and 0.37, respectively. On the average 31% of the applicants judged as unfit by one physician had been assessed as fit by the others, whereas agreement was only marginally better when detailed medical criteria for fitness were available. Lack of consensus on the medical fitness of an applicant, as evidenced by this study, suggests that the validity of such a judgment may be questionable even when detailed fitness criteria are available. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Donor profiles: demographic factors and their influence on the donor career\ud

Background and objectives  Studying the contribution of demographic factors to the donor career provides important knowledge to be used for donor management. The aim of this study is to gain insight into donor characteristics, more specifically into the demographic profile of active vs. resigned donors, and multi-gallon vs. occasional donors.\ud \ud Materials and methods  The study population consisted of all registered Dutch whole-blood donors between 1 January 2004 and 1 January 2005 (N = 370 470). The effect of several blood donor characteristics and demographic variables on (i) resigning donating and (ii) being a multi-gallon donor were assessed. Blood donor characteristics were extracted from the blood bank information system and included age, sex, blood group, number of donations and invitations. Demographic characteristics were constituted by population data on urbanization level, socio-economic status (income, housing value), and ethnicity.\ud \ud Results  Men clearly resigned less often than women (odds ratio (OR) 0·73, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0·72–0·75). Being older than 24 years, having a high income, a high-priced house, living in less urbanized areas or areas with relatively few ethnically diverse people also reduced the stopping risk. With respect to multi-gallon donorship, men were five times more often multi-gallon donor than women (OR 5·27, 95% CI 5·15–5·39) irrespective of the number of donation invitations. Furthermore, multi-gallon donors appeared to live in urbanized areas and have a higher income than occasional donors.\ud \ud Conclusion  Our results show that different donor profiles can be distinguished. Differences between active and resigned donors include age, the number of donations, sex, socio-economic-status, ethnicity, and urbanization level. The factors highly associated with being a multi-gallon donor are sex, age, socio-economic status, and to a lesser extent urbanization level. Donor profiles do provide the blood bank with knowledge on their donor population, which may be used as valuable information for donor recruitment and retention policies.\ud \u