The growing demand for plasma protein products has caused concern in many countries who largely rely on importing plasma products produced from plasma collected in the United States and Europe. ...Optimizing recruitment and retention of a diversity of plasma donors is therefore important for supporting national donation systems that can reliably meet the most critical needs of health services. This series of three systematic reviews aims to synthesize the known barriers and enablers to source plasma donation from the qualitative and survey-based literature and identify which strategies that have shown to be effective in promoting increased intention to, and actual donation of, source plasma.
Primary studies involving source or convalescent plasma donation via plasmapheresis will be included. The search strategy will capture all potentially relevant studies to each of the three reviews, creating a database of plasma donation literature. Study designs will be subsequently identified in the screening process to facilitate analysis according to the unique inclusion criteria of each review (i.e., qualitative, survey, and experimental designs). The search will be conducted in the electronic databases SCOPUS, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, and CINAHL without date or language restrictions. Studies will be screened, and data will be extracted, in duplicate by two independent reviewers with disagreements resolved through consensus. Reviews 1 and 2 will draw on the Theoretical Domains Framework and Intersectionality, while Review 3 will be informed by Behaviour Change Intervention Ontologies. Directed content analysis and framework analysis (Review 1), and descriptive and inferential syntheses (Reviews 2 and 3), will be used, including meta-analyses if appropriate.
This series of related reviews will serve to provide a foundation of what is known from the published literature about barriers and enablers to, and strategies for promoting, plasma donation worldwide.
COVID-19 has posed unprecedented challenges to health systems around the world, including blood collection agencies (BCAs). Many countries, such as Canada and Australia, that rely on non-remunerated ...voluntary donors saw an initial drop in donors in the early days of the pandemic followed by a return to sufficient levels of the blood supply. BCA messaging plays a key role in communicating the needs of the blood operator, promoting and encouraging donation, educating, and connecting with the public and donors. This paper is an interpretive discourse analysis of BCA messaging in Canada and Australia from March 1-July 31, 2020 to understand how BCAs constructed donation to encourage donation during this period and what this can tell us about public trust and blood operators. Drawing on multiple sources of online content and print media, our analysis identified four dominant messages during the study period: 1) blood donation is safe; 2) blood donation is designated an essential activity; 3) blood is needed; and 4) blood donation is a response to the pandemic. In Canada and Australia, our analysis suggests that: 1) in a time of uncertainty, donors and some publics trusted the BCA to be an organization with expertise to ensure that donation is safe, essential, and able to meet patient needs; and 2) BCAs demonstrated their trustworthiness by aligning their messaging with public health and scientific experts. For BCAs, our analysis supports donor communications that are transparent and responsive to public concerns and the local context to support public trust. Beyond BCAs, health organizations and leaders cannot underestimate the importance of building and maintaining public trust as countries continue to struggle with containment of the virus and encourage vaccine uptake.
Purpose: A growing body of scientific evidence supports the role of food and diet in the pathogenesis and management of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). However, little is known about the role of ...food and diet from the perspectives of pediatric patients and their parents. This study aimed to explore how children and adolescents with IBD and their parents coped with the illness through food and diet in their daily lives.
Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 children and adolescents with IBD, 26 parents and one grandparent.
Results: Two major themes, dietary strategies and family food practices, were identified through thematic analysis. There were three types of dietary strategies: food avoidance and moderation; following a specific diet; and healthy eating. For family food practices, two subthemes were identified: impact on grocery shopping, meal planning, and cooking; and maintaining routine and normality.
Conclusions: Our findings have important implications for the clinical care of pediatric IBD. Notably, IBD not only influenced the food practices of the pediatric patients, but also their parents and other family members. Healthcare professionals should consider the family unit when giving nutritional advice or developing nutritional guidelines. Personalized nutritional counselling and ongoing nutritional assessment are also warranted.
Private cord blood banking is the practice of paying to save cord blood for potential future use. Informed by the literature on corporeal commodification and feminist theories, this article analyses ...women’s work in banking cord blood. This article is based on in-depth interviews with 13 women who banked in a private bank in Canada. From learning about cord blood banking to collecting cord blood and transporting it to the private bank’s laboratory, women labour to ensure that cord blood is successfully banked. Private cord blood banking involves the overlap or insertion of commercial practices, and relations with clinical practices and relations that may cause tensions and confusion for women and clinical practitioners. Moreover, private banking reinforces and is reinforced by an ‘intensive mothering’ ideology. This article shows that corporeal commodification is not confined to a laboratory and the work of experts but extends into women’s everyday lives.
Private cord blood banking is the practice of paying to save cord blood for potential future use. Informed by the literature on corporeal commodification and feminist theories, this article analyses ...women's work in banking cord blood. This article is based on in-depth interviews with 13 women who banked in a private bank in Canada. From learning about cord blood banking to collecting cord blood and transporting it to the private bank's laboratory, women labour to ensure that cord blood is successfully banked. Private cord blood banking involves the overlap or insertion of commercial practices, and relations with clinical practices and relations that may cause tensions and confusion for women and clinical practitioners. Moreover, private banking reinforces and is reinforced by an 'intensive mothering' ideology. This article shows that corporeal commodification is not confined to a laboratory and the work of experts but extends into women's everyday lives.
Background
In many countries, sexually active gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (gbMSM) continue to be screened based on their sex or gender and the sex or gender of their sexual ...partner. However, there is growing support that screening based on specific sexual behaviors that pose risk of transfusion transmissible infection is a better approach to donor screening.
Study Design and Methods
This paper reports results from Phase 1 (qualitative) of a mixed‐methods study on Canadian blood and plasma donors' views on expanding eligibility for gbMSM by changing to sexual behavior‐based screening. Semistructured interview data with 40 donors (whole blood = 20, plasma = 20; male = 21, female = 18, nonbinary = 1; mean age = 46.2; 10% participation rate) in Canada were analyzed using a thematic approach.
Results
All participants, except one, supported the change as they anticipated that at least one of three outcomes would be achieved: increasing blood supply, enhancing equity, and improving or maintaining the safety of blood supply. One donor who was more skeptical of the change questioned the scientific evidence for the change and indicated mistrust of state institutions. The discussion considers implications for blood operators' communication strategies that can be used to reduce donor discomfort with the changes to donor screening.
Conclusion
In a nonrandom, purposive sample of 40 Canadian blood and plasma donors, most participants held favorable views regarding expanding the eligibility of gbMSM donors based on sexual risk behavior. Understanding donors' views on increasing eligibility may inform Canadian Blood Services and other blood operators as they develop their communications plans.
Background
Blood operators are working to improve donor screening and eligibility for gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (gbMSM), and trans and nonbinary donors. Many consider ...screening all donors for specific sexual risk behaviors to be a more equitable approach that maintains the safety of the blood supply. Feasibility considerations with this change include ensuring donor understanding of additional sexual behavior questions and minimizing donor loss due to discomfort.
Study design and methods
Qualitative one‐on‐one interviews were conducted with Canadian whole blood and plasma donors (N = 40). A thematic analysis was conducted to assess participants' understandings of the questions, examine their comfort/discomfort, and identify strategies to mitigate donor discomfort.
Results
All participants understood what the sexual behavior questions were asking and thought the questions were appropriate. Themes related to comfort/discomfort include: their expectations of donor screening, social norms that they bring to donation, whether their answer felt like personal disclosure, knowing the reasons for the question, trusting confidentiality, confidence in knowing their sexual partner's behavior, and potential for the question to be discriminatory. Strategies to mitigate discomfort include: providing an explanation for the questions, forewarning donors of these questions, reducing ambiguity, and using a self‐administered questionnaire.
Conclusion
While many blood operators and regulators view the move to sexual behavior–based screening for all donors as a significant paradigmatic shift, donors may not perceive additional sexual behavior questions as a significant change to their donation experience. Further research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of strategies to mitigate donor discomfort.
According to biomedical discourse, cord blood has been transformed from ‘waste’ to ‘clinical gold’ because of its potential for use in treatments. Private cord blood banks deploy clinical discourse ...to market their services to prospective parents, encouraging them to pay to bank cord blood as a form of ‘biological insurance’ to ensure their child’s future health. Social scientists have examined new forms of (bio)value produced in biological materials emergent with contemporary biotechnologies. This paper contributes to this literature by examining the social and technical production of value in cord blood units collected for private banking. Value, in this paper is defined as a socio-cultural concept in which an object is made meaningful, or valuable, through its relations with social actors and within specific regimes of value. I draw on in-depth interviews with women who banked cord blood and key informants in private banks in Canada, to analyze how social actors produced cord blood as a valuable biological object. I show that a cord blood unit holds promissory value for women who bank and profit value for private banks and that these values are folded into each other and the biological material itself. Analyzing how specific cord blood units are made valuable provides insight into the multiple and possibly competing values of biological materials and the tensions that may arise between social actors and forms of knowledge during the valuing process.
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