THE EFFECT OF THE DONATION IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM IN KOREA

For the activation of brain death organ donation, Korea has been operating the Donation Improvement Program (DIP: a program for promoting brain death organ donation), which was adapted and supplemented for the conditions of the country, extensively throughout the country and the program has been adopted by individual hospitals for their establishment and improvement of strategies. Thus, this study purposed to examine changes in each stage of DIP application and to suggest directions for future development. For this study were collected 6,653 cases of medical records of mortality from 36 DIP agreement hospitals for the period of the 6 months before agreement and 6-12 months after. When DIP was applied, those with education experience increased markedly and, as a result, medical workers' competence or knowledge for identifying potential brain-dead patient and referring them for organ donation also increased significantly and the review of medical records of mortality also increased.