Non-Financial Communication in Health Care Companies: A Framework for Social and Gender Reporting

Abstract

Social and gender reporting in the public sector has a double purpose: analyzing the social impact produced by the bodies of the public administration (PA), highlighting the reflection of their activity on women and men (gender auditing), and developing a series of policies aimed at achieving gender balance (gender budgeting), in order to provide useful indications of evolution, with respect to SDG 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. In the field of public enterprises, a very peculiar subcategory is represented by health care companies as they carry out activities in the field of care and health in all of its direct or indirect meanings. Among the stakeholders of health care companies, the most relevant are employees and patients; social and gender reporting that focuses on them allows for the calculation of the distribution of income and expenditure between the genders and the empowerment of spending policies to eliminate discrimination. To understand the spread of non-financial reporting tools among national health facilities, an exploratory survey was conducted in the period August–September 2022. Processing the data available on the website of the Italian Ministry of Health, a database was built containing a list of 1064 health facilities spread throughout the country including public hospitals, research institutes, and accredited private clinics. Data showed that only 10% of the structures had conducted some form of social or/and gender reporting, highlighting the need to improve the spread of these kind of tools. In order to overcome the gap identified between scientific studies and corporate practices on gender and social reporting, we propose a framework for the construction of social and gender reporting in the health care sector. Based on the Italian standards, envisaged for the realization of social reporting and based on the regulatory provisions for public bodies on the reclassification of revenue and expenditure by gender, we propose a process of development for social and gender reporting that focuses on reporting the areas of intervention of health activity in which the gender dimension is equally represented.