Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Cardiac transplantation remains the best treatment for patients with end-stage heart disease that is refractory to medical or device therapies, however, a major challenge for heart transplantation is the persistent discrepancy between the number of patients on waiting lists and the number of available hearts. While other countries (eg, UK, Australia and Belgium) have explored and implemented alternative models of transplantation, such as cardiac donation after circulatory determination of death (DCDD) to alleviate transplantation wait times, ethical concerns have hindered implementation in some countries. This study aims to explore the attitudes and opinions of healthcare providers and the public about cardiac DCDD in order to identify and describe opportunities and challenges in ensuring that proposed cardiac DCDD procedures in Canada are consistent with Canadian values and ethical norms.
Methods and analysis This study will include two parts that will be conducted concurrently. Part 1 is a qualitative study consisting of semi-structured interviews with Canadian healthcare providers who routinely care for organ donors and/or transplant recipients to describe their perceptions about cardiac DCDD. Part 2 is a convergent parallel mixed-methods design consisting of a series of focus groups and follow-up surveys with members of the Canadian general public to describe their perceptions about cardiac DCDD.
Ethics and dissemination This study has been approved by the Research Ethics Board at Western University. The findings will be presented at regional and national conferences and reported in peer-reviewed publications.
- cardiac donation
- cardiac transplantation
- donation after circulatory determination of death
- mixed methods research
- healthcare professional perceptions
- ETHICS (see Medical Ethics)
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Contributors KH, IB and JPL contributed to the conception and design of this study with input from all other authors. All authors contributed to the refinement of the study design and the preparation of this manuscript.
Funding This work was supported by the Canadian Blood Services Kenneth J Fyke Award.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval Both components of this study have been approved by the Research Ethics Board at Western University.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.