Epruvetka

Name of the activity: Epruvetka

Country/NMO: Slovenia (SloMSIC)

Program: Health Systems

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Campaign. Combination of education and advocacy. Campaigns create awareness in society about a certain topic (education aspect) and try to funnel this awareness into pressure on the decision makers to adapt policies accordingly (advocacy aspect).

General description:

Project Epruvetka was founded by medical students from Faculty of Medicine University of Maribor, Slovenia, with a purpose to increase awareness about importance of blood, bone marrow and organ donation.

Our main goal is introduce general population with idea of donation, altruism. We want to present to people how important is donation, it can save lives. To accomplish these goals we educate people, especially teenagers and young adults, whose ages are suitable for donation, about whole process and possible ways to define themselves as donors. Another way to confront our vision is through public promotions, where we present our project and its topics to general population. We offer enrollment in the Slovenia Donor Registry (bone marrow register) at promotion stand.

Every now and then, we also arrange conferences with different topics each time, to educate our own students.

Focus area:

Organ, stem-cell and tissue donation

Problem statement:

Our main aim is to introduce general population with idea of donation, altruism. We strive to achieve self-sufficiency in blood supply and great enough recruitment of bone marrow and organs (post mortal donation) by raising percentage of defined potential donors.

In Slovenia we need in average 300 blood units per day, which leads to about 110 000 units of blood per year. We have only 62 000 regular donors, they (all combined) donate 97 000 units of blood, which is barely enough.

Target groups:

General population

Beneficiaries:

General population

Objectives and indicators of success:

Our objectives for this year:

-To perform 45 lectures in highschools around Slovenia until end of year

-To organize 8 public promotions until end of year

-To write and publish manual for general population about donation in general, to present statistic of donor and donation and to educate about procedure of how to become donor until august

– To make poster with main criteria of who can donate blood (it will help our promotions) until may.

– To redesign our promotional material (T-shirts and fliers), to be more representative until new school year (1.10.2019)

– To connect with company with younger collective, to educate them and to encourage them to donation until end of the year.

-To shoot a video for promotion for blood donation until december.

Methodology:

There are 95 members (medical students). 5 of us are so called organizational team. Each of us has specific role.

Lectures and promotions: organizational team will organize lectures and promotions (date, place, topic) and inform members about it. We will ensure that we have speakers for each lecture and volunteers for promotions. Our organizational team is also responsible for education of our members, to secure quality of our activities.

Manual and video: we will design a smaller work group for these projects. Every person will have a specific job.

Plans for evaluation:

We already have an evaluation method. After every lecture we give the participants a short questionnaire in which we ask them if our lecture had an impact on their decision towards blood, blood marrow and organ donation. They also have to evaluate the person that carried out the lecture.