How can healthcare systems remain functional during crises, war and disruptions to infrastructure and supply chains without creating one model for ordinary times and another for emergencies? This seminar explores how person-centred care can serve as the foundation for a healthcare system that is resilient by design, with home dialysis as a concrete and compelling example.

Home dialysis shows how advanced care at home can be organised around the capabilities, needs and resources of patients and families, while also strengthening the system’s overall resilience and surge capacity. By reducing reliance on hospital-based treatment and enabling more care to be delivered safely outside hospital walls, home dialysis can help create capacity within the healthcare system when demand rises sharply or services are disrupted. In this way, surge capacity is not only a matter of beds, staff and emergency plans, but also of designing care models that are flexible, distributed and sustainable in everyday practice.

Through robust logistics, secure access to medicines and consumables, support for self-care, digital monitoring, home preparedness and close coordination between patients, healthcare providers, pharmacies and public actors, care can remain safe, continuous and adaptable across both ordinary conditions and exceptional circumstances.

In this perspective, resilience is not a parallel system activated only in crisis. It is an integrated feature of person-centred healthcare itself. The home becomes not only a place of care, but part of the healthcare system’s infrastructure and capacity. Home dialysis can therefore be understood as a model for how person-centred care can strengthen continuity, support patient autonomy, expand surge capacity and reduce pressure on hospitals under stress.

The seminar brings together perspectives from policy, healthcare, innovation and person-centred care to discuss how home-based care models can support a more resilient healthcare system for both everyday delivery and exceptional circumstances.