The Stuff of Interventions
The Stuff of Interventions
Technologies of Compliance in Hemophilia Care
This chapter explores situated intervention in the practice of the hemophilia home treatment carried out under the responsibility of a hemophilia care center. Interventions here are strongly connected to STS and sociological research on the issue of compliance and on studies that focus on making work visible. Non-compliance is often conceptualized as a problem per se in the quality of care literature, resulting in a plethora of equally unsuccessful compliance enhancement initiatives and cognitive interventions. Medical sociologists and STS researchers question the aim of full compliance, realizing that patients have to live in many different worlds simultaneously – worlds which at times may challenge their role of patient. By shifting their focus from trying to understand irrational non-compliance to the study of achieving compliance in practice they have indicated interesting acting space for situating compliance enhancement initiatives in the complexity of the life-worlds of patients. In this chapter I explore what happens when such insights are translated into material and organizational interventions, for example in the form of introducing monitoring devices for particularly risky settings, and relate these translations back to the possible gains for sociology and for practices of hemophilia care.
Keywords: Materiality, Invisible work, Translation, Compliance, Adherence, Hemophilia, Life-worlds
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