Current and Ongoing Projects

This is part of our work within the BTRU in Donor Health and Behaviour

ECHO aims to explore how donors experience their journey as a donor, from arrival at the donor centre to departure, in terms of emotions, experience of the centre and what they pay attention to while donating. It also examines how they recall their donation experience one month later and how these factors predict future donations.

While few studies have explored how donors' emotions vary across a donation, none have examined what predicts these emotions, for example, whether factors such as the centre's level of activity, noise, or temperature are significant. We also know little about what donors pay attention to while donating. Does interaction with staff and each other create a sense of camaraderie? Do any of these influence if the donor returns to make a subsequent donation?

Furthermore, while here is ample evidence that our memory of an event (in this case, blood donation) is fallible and reconstructed we do not know (i) how memories about blood donation are formed and relate to the actual experiences and emotions that the donor experienced while donating, and (ii) whether it is the donors' memory of their donation or what happened while donating that predicts return rates.

The results of this study will provide invaluable evidence to help NHSBT develop strategies to increase donor retention rates and enhance the donor journey and experience.

The BTRU in Donor Health and Behaviour is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the University of Nottingham and the University of Queensland. It is funded by NIHR in collaboration with NHSBT. The BTRU is organised across three interlinked themes: Theme 1 - Donor behaviour, Theme 2 - Safety of blood donation and Theme 3 - Efficiency of blood donation. 

Donor behaviour (Theme 1) is the focus of the work at Nottingham, in collaboration with Professor Barbara Masser at the University of Queensland. 

This theme explores why people from ethnic minorities are less likely to donate blood by understanding cultural sensitivities through co-design to develop novel strategies to enhance recruitment and retention of donors focusing on ‘othering’, tailoring, impact of deferrals and incentives. We also explore the blood donor’s “natural history”  using ecological approaches to examine donors' attention, memory and emotion while they donate.  We are also looking to understand the blood donors' cooperative phenotype to help us better understand why people donate blood rather than other altruistic behaviours (e.g., done time and money to charity).

Team for Theme 1: Eamonn Ferguson (Lead), Prof Barbara Masser (co-Lead, University of Queensland), Dr Richard Mills (Research Fellow), Robert Smith (PhD Student).

The rising need for plasma in England to produce plasma-derived medicinal products (PDMPs) requires developing strategies to encourage and retain new plasma donors.  This is the focus of the NHSBT-funded PROMOTE project by exploring the effectiveness and moral acceptability of different incentives (e.g., loyalty schemes, lotteries, gift vouchers, opt-out, warm-glow, nudges, a simple thank you) in current plasma donors and the UK general population.

Team: Eamonn Ferguson (Lead), Richard Mills (Co-I), Su Brailsford (NHSBT: Co-I), Barbara Masser (University of Queensland : CO-I), Roshan Desai (Researcher).

To ensure blood safety, all new and returning blood donors are asked questions to select lower-risk donors. These questions focus on travel, lifestyle, medical/sexual health history, and sexual behaviour. There are several issues with how donors perceive, interpret, and answer these questions. Furthermore, people from ethnic minority communities are more likely to be deferred through their response to the travel questions, resulting in perceived discrimination and a reluctance to donate. The PROMPT programme of research, funded by NHSBT, uses a mixture of epidemiological analyses and behavioural studies with donors and the general UK population to explore the impact of these biases and test the effectiveness of potential interventions.

Team: Eamonn Ferguson (Lead), Su Brailsford (NHSBT: Co-I), Barbara Masser (University of Queensland: CO-I), Katy Davison (UKHSA: Co-I), Claire Reynolds (NHSBT: Co-I),, Mark Croucher (NHSBT: Co-I) Naim Akhtar (NHSBT: Co-I) Niall O'Hagan (Researcher).

People from ethnic minorities are less likely to register their decision on the organ donor register (ODR) to be deceased donors (DD), become living donors (LD), or engage in transplant-related research, with family members also less likely to support DD. To explore this, this programme of NHSBT-funded research utilises a mixture of behavioural studies and co-designed, arts-based approaches to engage people emotionally with organ donation, allowing communities to create their solutions and resources. 

Team: Eamonn Ferguson (Lead), Abiola Okubanjo (Actin on Blood: Co-I),  Oluwayomi Adegbaju (NHSBT: Co-I), John Richardson (NHSBT: Co-I), Jane Noyes (Bangor University: Co-I), Lee Shepherd (University of Northumbria: Co-I), Richard Mills (University of Nottingham: Co-I). Leah McLaughlin  (Bangor University: Co-I), Muskaan Pal (Researcher), 

The DND is a collaboration between The University of Nottingham PHB Lab and NHSBT to explore the trade-off between travel time and time spent waiting in the donor centre and how this is impacted by how worthwhile the travel is. This is being explored across the context of multiple blood products, including whole blood, plasma, and platelets. This work started as a large-scale review of the current research into the physical space and geography of donor centres across the UK and around the world. The current research is based off of the results of this literature review.

Team: Eamonn Ferguson (Lead), Niall O'Hagan (Researcher), Uchechi Izuka (NHSBT: Co-I), Rebekah Lomax (NHSBT: Co-I) Crispin Wickenden (NHSBT: Co-I), Gareth Humphreys (NHSBT: Co-I)

The SHAPE Plasma Trial is part of the BTRU in donor health and behaviour and is led by Prof Emanuele Di Angelantonio (University of Cambridge). This RCT will randomise plasma donors in England to one of three intervals (two weeks, four weeks and eight weeks),  one of two volumes (usual volume or usual volume +12%) and one of two behaviour interventions (business a usual or in centre commitment).  We are providing behaviour science input to design. Outcomes will be assessed in terms of markers of (i) donor health, including haemoglobin levels, iron levels, self-reported health, (ii) productivity (e.g., the number of immunoglobins) and (iii) behaviour (e.g., frequency of donation, do not attend rates, emotional impact).

Team: Emanuele Di Angelantonio (University of Cambridge (Lead) and the wider Cambridge BTRIU; Eamonn Ferguson (University of Nottingham), Richard Mills (Research Fellow, University of Nottingham)

Farmer-led Epidemic and Endemic Disease-management (FEED) is a BBSRC-funded project that aims to understand the impact of farmer-led control on livestock disease outbreaks and to develop effective control strategies for disease outbreaks by taking farmer-led control into account. The interdisciplinary research group includes epidemiologists, mathematical modellers, behavioural scientists, and veterinarians from the University of Warwick and Nottingham. We have been using economic games to explore farmer cooperative preferences and strategies. These provide parameters to be incorporated into mathematic models of infectious disease that allow individual behaviour to be modelled when considering political implications for disease progression.

Team: Warwick Team: Ed Hill, Mike Tildesley, Paul Brown, Mike Keeling,   Nottingham Team: Martin Green, Naomi Prosser, Jasmeet Kaler; Eamonn Ferguson

The British Academy funded this project. In the UK, there is a substantial shortage of organs for transplantation. This project explores two essential psychological strategies to encourage people to agree to donate their organs and for families to consent for their relative's organs to be transplanted.  Specifically, this project explores whether improving peoples' emotional beliefs towards organ donation through cognitive reappraisal increases their willingness to donate their organs (Study 1) and a deceased family member’s organs (Study 2). In both studies participants will be randomly allocated to either i) receive instructions to cognitively about organ donation (cognitive reappraisal group) or ii) not (control group) and various outcomes assessing efficacy assessed.

 Video of Findings

We have produced a short video to detail the main findings of this project https://www.powtoon.com/c/fYRaKdqPjzO/1/m 

Team: PI Dr Lee Shepherd (Nothumbria University), Co-Is (Prof Eamonn Ferguson, University of Nottingham, Prof Ronan O’Carrol University of Stirling)