Heather Gardiner, PhD, MPH, is Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences in Temple University’s College of Public Health. Gardiner directs the Health Disparities Research Lab and the Office of Community Engaged Research and Practice, which leads growth of the college’s interdisciplinary, community based activities for research, teaching, service and practice. She is a mixed-methodologist with a program of research focused at the intersection of interpersonal health communication and organ and tissue donation and transplantation. Across these areas of research, her primary goals have been to improve the organ and tissue donation process in the United States, reduce transplant inequities, and increase access to transplantation for ethnic minorities and other underserved or marginalized populations. Gardiner earned her doctorate from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and her master’s in Public Health from Virginia Commonwealth University.
This webinar will highlight the impact of referral timing and assessing family readiness to make a donation decision. We will review the donation conversation in relation to evidence-based research. Experiential-based practices will be compared and contrasted to prompt group discussion in examining what OPOs have learned from research, where improvements can be made and where more research can offer benefit to both potential donor families and recipients. Ways of implementing evidence-based and standards of practice into organizational processes will be discussed along with how OPOs and hospital staff may best work together to support mutually familiar and understood standards of practice to assure every potential donor family has the opportunity to make a timely and fully informed donation decision.