Coimbra University Hospitals are an academic affiliated institution providing high standard health care to the central region of Portugal.

A significant proportion of admitted patients to the medical or surgical wards have 65 or more years, with psychiatric co morbidities such as dementia, depression and delirium being highly prevalent.

So far, mental health care to inpatients has been provided by the emergency psychiatric team. However this type of service has several important limitations, including the lack of continuity of care, difficulties regarding interaction with the ward staff and poor quality of clinical notes.

Thus, the Psychogeriatric Unit from Coimbra University Hospital created a new LOAP service in order to initiate a consistent project that focus on psychiatric disturbances occurring in elderly inpatients at medical wards, based on the following premises: 1. providing a high quality standard of services; 2. performing standardized clinical assessment and data gathering (with essential neurocognitive tools); 3. ensuring continuity of care during hospitalization and after discharge (outpatient setting, day hospital).

Additionally, our Unit is currently developing clinical investigation on Delirium and organizing educational meetings covering psychiatric areas such as Depression in the elderly, Dementia and Delirium.

With this work the authors aim to present the project as well as some preliminary results.