Defining Quality Criteria for Success in Organ Donation Programs: A Scoping Review

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Well-established performance measures for organ donation programs do not fully address the complexity and multifactorial nature of organ donation programs such as the influence of relationships and organizational attributes. OBJECTIVE: To synthesize the current evidence on key organizational attributes and processes of international organ donation programs associated with successful outcomes and to generate a framework to categorize those attributes. DESIGN: Scoping Review using a mixed methods approach for data extraction. SETTING: Databases included PubMed, CINAHL, Embase, LILACS, ABI Business ProQuest, Business Source Premier, and gray literature (organ donation association websites, Google Scholar—first 8 pages), and searches for gray literature were performed, and relevant websites were perused. SAMPLE: Organ donation programs or processes. METHODS: We systematically searched the literature to identify any research design, including text and opinion papers and unpublished material (research data, reports, institutional protocols, government documents, etc). Searches were completed on January 2018, updated it in May 2019, and lastly in March 2020. Title, abstracts, and full texts were screened independently by 2 reviewers with disagreements resolved by a third. Data extraction followed a mixed method approach in which we extracted specific details about study characteristics such as type of research, year of publication, origin/country of study, type of journal published, and key findings. Studies included considered definitions and descriptions of success in organ donation programs in any country by considering studies that described (1) attributes associated with success or effectiveness, (2) organ donation processes, (3) quality improvement initiatives, (4) definitions of organ donation program effectiveness, (5) evidence-based practices in organ donation, and (6) improvements or success in such programs. We tabulated the type and frequency of the presence or absence of reported improvement ...