Elsevier

Transplantation Proceedings

Volume 45, Issue 7, September 2013, Pages 2584-2586
Transplantation Proceedings

36th Congress of the italian transplantation society
Organ donation
Organ and Tissue Donation in Migrants: Advanced Course for Cross-Cultural Mediators

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.transproceed.2013.07.029Get rights and content

Abstract

Between 2004 and 2010 in Piedmont (Italy Northern Region) 1556 brain-death situations were reported, including 113 (7.3%) in migrants as potential organ and tissue donors. The health staff often has to face migrants, who show great cultural differences and language difficulties. The Molinette Hospital Customer Care Service, the Piedmont Regional Tissue and Organ Procurement Coordination Agency (RPC), and the Cross-Cultural Mediators Association (CMA) organized a special course for intercultural mediators, to decrease misunderstandings between the health staff and the migrants' families and to improve professional communication. In 2011, 28 cultural-linguistic mediators representing different groups of migrants in Piemonte took part in a specific course. Over a 5 month period they were informed about emotional and communicative aspects, proper to the moment of death, as well as organ donation as an intercultural field, the professional role of the mediator, the clinical and forensic aspects of brain death and donation, and the psychological aspects of organ donation. The course was organized by cultural-linguistic mediators of the CMA, the staff of the RPC and the teachers at Turin University. The list of the 21 mediators who passed the final exam was given to organ and tissue donation hospital co-ordinators in Piedmont, so that if necessary, they could obtain the cooperation of these qualified people.

Section snippets

Materials and Methods

The choice of intercultural mediators included the following requirements: qualification in intercultural mediation in the sanitary area, availability to participates in every single phase of the course including the final exam, willingness to be present at meetings organized by the intensive care staff. The teachers involved in the project were skilled in cross-cultural mediation in the sanitary area, including anthropologists, psychologists, and RPC doctors.

Between February and June 2011,

Results

There were 28 candidates registered for the course who were already qualified as linguistic-cultural mediators: Arabic and dialects; Albanian; Chinese; Rumanian; Moldavian; Serbo-Croatian; French; English; German; Spanish; and Russian and came from the main Piedmont towns. Among the 28 candidates, 3 withdrew from the course, 2 failed the final exam, and 2 were not available even after finishing the course and passing the exam.

The remaining 21 qualified candidates in September 2011, compared the

Discussion

Culture, race, and religion, at least in part, overlap each other.9 According to Hofstede,11 culture is a general phenomenon, characterized by unwritten laws, that are partly shared with people who live or have lived in the same social environment. This “group planning” starts from infancy.11 Most people live in collective cultures that feel as though they are part of a wide family structure. It is quite understandable that migrants of the same cultural background prefer to live in immediate

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