Bringing Care Closer: How DKSH Patient Solutions Supports Disability-Inclusive Healthcare Journeys Across Asia Pacific

On December 3, the world recognizes the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, this year under the United Nations theme, “Fostering disability-inclusive societies for advancing social progress.”

Why disability inclusion is a healthcare design question? For many, disability inclusion in healthcare is still often interpreted as physical accessibility, such as ramps, wider doorways or accessible websites. Important as these are, they address only a few of the support needs. Significant gaps remain in the treatment journey for persons with disabilities. Studies consistently show three structural challenges that make it difficult for people to use the therapies prescribed to them:

  • Distance and transport: Geography, mobility limitations or lack of transport options put hospital-based care out of reach for many. In Asia-Pacific, distance remains a leading reason patients forgo or delay care
  • Complexity of advanced therapies: Modern chronic disease therapies, such as pumps, injections and titration, can be challenging to manage without clear training or caregiver support. Without this support, many struggle to self-manage or adhere to their treatment
  • Fragmentation between hospital and home care: Treatment plans designed in hospital settings often fail to continue after discharge due to poor coordination, unclear hand-offs, and limited follow-up or community-based support

Together, these challenges highlight a core issue: many patients living with disabilities struggle to access or continue the care they need because the system around them is not designed for their realities. Distance, therapy complexity, and fragmented transitions between hospital and home create barriers that make ongoing care difficult.

This is where disability-inclusive healthcare design becomes essential.

At DKSH Patient Solutions, we address these systemic barriers by developing Patient Support Programs (PSPs) focused on addressing convenience challenges across Asia-Pacific. These programs are built around the realities patients and healthcare systems face, including distance to care, limited hospital capacity, mobility or cognitive limitations, and the demands of managing therapy at home. By combining nurse support, patient education, and logistical coordination, our PSPs reduce avoidable friction in the care pathway and make it easier for patients to begin therapy.

Barrier 1: Distance and Transport

Across many Asia-Pacific health systems, specialist care is concentrated in large urban hospitals that already manage high patient volumes with limited resources. For patients living with disabilities, each hospital visit can involve long travel times, crowded waiting rooms, and significant disruption for caregivers. What is often described as “convenience,” or avoiding an extra trip to the hospital, is for these patients, a question of whether they can realistically continue care at all.

In Thailand, our Patient Support Programs address this by moving routine touchpoints out of the hospital and into patients’ homes. Working with public hospital partners in the Greater Bangkok area, we organize structured home visits where trained nurses handle recurring tasks such as monitoring, simple procedures and check-ins that previously would have required a return to the hospital.

Overtime, our program has supported many patients through home visits. For hospital partners, our home-care program helps relieve pressure on outpatient clinics and frees up capacity. For patients living with disabilities, reducing avoidable hospital trips can help them keep up with their follow-up care, manage dosing more reliably, and ultimately stay on therapy longer.

Barrier 2: Complexity of Advanced Therapies

As therapies become more advanced, the barrier is no longer only access to a prescription; it is the ability to manage a complex regimen every day. Pumps, infusions, injections and dose titration protocols require skills, time and confidence that many patients, caregivers, and even local health systems struggle to sustain. Without structured support, people can feel overwhelmed, and promising therapies risk being underused or discontinued.

In Australia, we partner with a leading biopharmaceutical company to support people living with Parkinson’s disease who are prescribed device-assisted therapies. Initiating this kind of therapy typically involves a surgically placed pump that delivers medication continuously and an intensive period of dose titration over several days, until the treating healthcare professional is confident about the right dose for each individual. During this period, patients and families must learn to live with a new device, respond to symptoms and alarms, and organize refills and supplies, often while hospital teams are already stretched and only a small number of nurses have hands-on experience with this specific therapy.

Through our Patient Support Programs, DKSH Patient Solutions maintains a dedicated pool of nurses available on the ground for home-based support. Our specialist nurses, who have spent many years working with this therapy, are trained to support patients at home by helping them understand the treatment, navigate the titration period alongside the healthcare team, and coordinate practical tasks such as ordering medicines and consumables. By providing this specialized, face-to-face support around a complex therapy, our programs help bridge the gap between what is clinically possible in hospital and what is realistically manageable in patients’ daily lives.

Barrier 3: Fragmentation, the “Missing Middle” Between Hospital and Home

The third barrier is fragmentation. Many healthcare ecosystems in Asia-Pacific have strong “islands” of care such as specialist centres, public hospitals, community clinics, but relatively little that actively connects them. Care plans are written in one setting, implemented in another, and too often the handover between the two is left for patients and families to manage on their own.

For people living with disabilities, this fragmentation is especially costly. Instructions given during a short hospital stay are easy to forget once patients are back in their everyday environment. Untrained caregivers end up acting as de facto care coordinators, trying to interpret dosing schedules, device alarms and refill timelines. Small misunderstandings can silently accumulate until they surface as avoidable complications or unplanned hospital visits.

Our Patient Support Programs are designed to operate in this “missing middle” between hospital and home. Building on Patient Support programs such as our Parkinson’s support program in Australia and home-care services in Thailand, nurses work under the direction of prescribing healthcare professionals and act as a structured bridge, reinforcing treatment plans at home, sharing observations back with the clinic, and following agreed escalation pathways when a medical review is needed.

For our partners, this is where a Patient Solutions provider becomes a strategic asset: by running this “missing middle” with accountable teams, standard processes and clear feedback loops for healthcare professionals across countries and therapy areas.

Looking Ahead

Distance, complexity, and fragmentation will continue to be a part of how care is delivered in Asia-Pacific. For people living with disabilities, these are not secondary issues, but they often decide whether a patient can continue to be on therapy or leave it as a plan on paper.

At DKSH Patient Solutions, our role is to work with partners to design Patient Support Programs that begin with acknowledging these realities. In practice, that means bringing key steps closer to where patients live, providing realistic nurse support around complex therapies, and making sure information and responsibility move clearly between hospital and home. By doing so, we can help reduce avoidable gaps in the care pathway and give more patients with disabilities a chance to stay on therapies that meet their needs.

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