Institute of Health Policy, Management & Evaluation, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Int J Soc Determinants Health Health Serv. 2024 Oct;54(4):412-422. doi: 10.1177/27551938241269136. Epub 2024 Aug 14.
Over the past 20 years, plasma has become a medical treatment characterized as "liquid gold" to signal its lifesaving potential. Through a manufacturing process termed fractionation, plasma, collected through blood donation, is turned into Plasma Derived Medical Products (PDMPs). The World Health Organization (WHO) has underlined the importance of PDMPs for global health care, including a number of PDMPs on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. The process of collecting plasma from a donor, manufacturing plasma derived treatments, and distributing those treatments globally requires the coordination of multiple social actors operating in different social, political and economic contexts, but has received little attention in scholarly literature on public policy or the social sciences. This paper will introduce a set of analytic questions and concepts that can direct a sociology of plasma products. We build on the behavioral turn in the policy sciences to identify relevant policy questions emerging from this field and offer the analytic tools necessary to investigate how different social actors in this space make meaning of plasma. To do this, we will draw on key concepts in the sociology of health and illness.
在过去的 20 年中，血浆已成为一种被称为“液体黄金”的医疗手段，其潜在的救命价值可见一斑。通过一种被称为“分馏”的制造工艺，从献血中收集的血浆被转化为血浆衍生的医疗产品（PDMPs）。世界卫生组织（WHO）强调了 PDMPs 对全球医疗保健的重要性，其中包括一些被列入世界卫生组织基本药物示范清单的 PDMPs。从供体中采集血浆、制造血浆衍生的治疗方法以及在全球范围内分发这些治疗方法的过程需要协调在不同社会、政治和经济背景下运作的多个社会行为者，但在公共政策或社会科学的学术文献中却很少受到关注。本文将介绍一组分析问题和概念，这些问题和概念可以指导对血浆产品的社会学研究。我们借鉴政策科学中的行为转变，确定该领域出现的相关政策问题，并提供必要的分析工具，以研究该领域的不同社会行为者如何理解血浆。为此，我们将借鉴健康和疾病社会学中的关键概念。
