Gender and healthcare environments: a proposal of gender-sensitive methodology for improving the environmental quality in the existing heritage

Abstract

The influence of the healthcare environment on individual well-being has been object of great interest during the last decades, with the aim to identify the most proper design criteria, able to comply with the contemporary patient-centered vision of care and medicine.
The many typologies of hospital, which changed significantly over the centuries, usually were consistent with the coeval vision of care, but today this correspondence seems rarely to occur. This issue is particularly significant in Italy, where even the 66% of the existing healthcare facilities was built before 1970. The improvement of these facilities in a patient-centered perspective, therefore, becomes a challenge to be faced necessarily.
A crucial issue that still need to be faced, moreover, is how the influence of the healthcare settings on individuals may change depending on their gender. Recent studies combining medicine and sociology, medicine and architectural design, and, finally, architecture and gender studies, were developed during the last thirty years. However, the intersection of the aforementioned disciplines hasn’t yet been addressed.
 For this reason, a multidisciplinary research has been recently undertaken in order to identify suitable design criteria for the humanization of the existing facilities, in a new and gender-sensitive perspective. The present article describes a first proposal of methodology aimed to achieve this objective.