Maternity Spaces and Integral Human Development. Healthy Settings in Maternal-Child Health Centers in Kenya. A pilot study

The research focuses on maternity environment and its impact on users' health. Healthy setting is known to influence childbirth and health outcomes for women and children. The birth environment supports the achievement of positive outcomes by influencing the experiences and perceptions of users. More is yet to be discovered on how environments support interpersonal relationships, dignity, and humanization in a childbirth setting and health outcomes. The proposal will investigate the relations between maternity spaces and integral human development to understand how the environment of maternity places affects user's dignity, aesthetic perception, human relationships and, consequently, health outcomes. It focuses on the environment variables contributing to the integral human development of the mothers' and babies' health in the context of developing countries by evaluating the barriers and facilitators of birth spaces in the Maternal-Child Health Centers in Nairobi, Kenya. The research is interdisciplinary involving investigators from Architecture, Health Science and Social Science.

Principal Investigators: Laura Iannuzzi (Bournemouth University), John Onyango (architecture), Paul Perrin (Pulte Institute), Nicoletta Setola (University of Florence), and Vania Smith-Oka (anthropology)
Partners: Brother Andre Medical Center (Nairobi, Kenya) and University of Florence (Italy)