Index Snapshot
Public awareness
There are ongoing efforts and events organized by local psoriatic disease patient and healthcare organizations to spread awareness to other people living with the disease and care providers, as well as the general public. The largest of these campaigns seek to connect different organizations both within and across borders, to allow for coordinated patient-advocacy efforts.
Provider Awareness
In many countries, when people first present with symptoms of psoriatic disease, they often go to a primary care facility to consult a GP about those symptoms. GPs therefore often form the front-line of psoriatic disease care provision. Different healthcare systems have different access to psoriatic disease-related resources and training for GPs, resulting in various degrees of knowledge about the disease.
Patient Engagement
Psoriatic disease requires life-long treatment, therefore patients’ adherence to their prescribed medication is integral to ensuring treatment effectiveness. Support for treatment adherence exists in some forms in some of the analyzed countries, either as services offered by the national prescriber or through privately developed digital services. In some countries, support for adherence to treatment is offered at the discretion of the clinician or mainly lacking.
The assessment of people’s quality of life and mental health is reported to be done in all the countries assessed, although clinical and practical barriers may hinder the assessment in some settings.
Health Systems
The time it takes for people to receive a psoriasis or psoriatic arthritis diagnosis can greatly impact disease severity. Time to diagnosis varies greatly between the countries analyzed but in all countries the time between when symptoms first appear and the diagnosis of psoriatic disease is alarmingly long. Barriers to medication access manifest in different forms across the Western Pacific Region, resulting in varying access to the optimal treatment for people living with psoriatic disease. Availability of specialist care differs often within countries, where rural areas present a lower density of specialists compared to urban areas.
Enabling Environment
Two major aspects of the societal burden of psoriatic disease
are the direct and indirect costs for care. A higher total expenditure by the state is typically an indication that the public system is investing more in the care of people living with psoriatic disease, whereas higher expenditure made by patients is an indication that the economic burden is placed directly on those living with psoriatic disease, which can be detrimental to both their health outcomes and their household budgets. Costs of care for psoriatic disease widely vary in the analyzed countries, therefore impacting the share of healthcare costs the person living with the disease has to pay out-of-pocket.
Recommendations
- Pursue reductions in psoriatic disease stigma in the general public, partly through targeted public awareness campaigns
- Reduce the stigma associated with mental health care from the perspectives of both patients and care providers
- Promote accessibility and equality of care for those who live in remote areas
- Reduce patients’ cost burden, in part by advancing universal health coverage
- Reduce waiting times for specialists
