Conference Program

Access to healthcare services represents a crucial juncture in the exercise of citizenship and in the relationship between individuals and institutions, as it is within these contexts that fundamental rights are translated into concrete practices and power relations. Healthcare constitutes a particularly sensitive space, characterized by informational asymmetries, conditions of vulnerability, and a strong dependence on communication between citizens and professionals. In this framework, the presence of communication barriers directly affects the possibility of exercising rights in a full and effective manner.

For the Deaf community, such barriers assume a structural relevance, since communication is not an ancillary element of the care pathway, but rather an essential condition for decisional autonomy, informed consent, and the establishment of trust in healthcare institutions. Despite the formal recognition of the right to health, the lack of services designed according to accessibility criteria continues to produce often invisible forms of exclusion, transforming legally guaranteed rights into merely nominal rights.

This contribution analyzes access to healthcare and public services as a matter of substantive democratic inclusion, challenging a conception of accessibility understood solely as a technical accommodation or an emergency solution. The intervention is situated within a broader reflection on the accessibility of healthcare services, including their increasingly digital dimension, interpreted as a structural requirement of equality and as a condition for the effective exercise of citizenship.

Through a critical perspective that intertwines disability studies, democratic theory, and the analysis of public institutions, this contribution highlights how inclusion cannot be reduced to a logic of concession or individual adaptation, but must be recognized as an organizing principle of healthcare policies and public services. From this standpoint, accessibility emerges as a fundamental parameter for assessing the democratic quality of healthcare systems and as a central element in the construction of a truly inclusive citizenship.