Background The purpose of this article is to describe an interventional project in a University Hospital. It explains the adjustments that were made to provide good care for patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities in an acute care setting in Western Switzerland. It is not the exposition of the results of a formalised research or study. Rather, this article relates the success story of a project initiated by a small group of passionate people on their free time, that eventually entered in the 2020 strategic planning of the largest hospital of Switzerland. Switzerland does not have a national policy regarding health needs for patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Health care professionals are not trained to identify and meet the specific health needs of this population and little is taught about intellectual and developmental disabilities during undergraduate studies. Method The Disability Project was conducted between 2012 and 2017 in Geneva University Hospital, as follows: Firstly, over sixty working group sessions took place to identify the specific health needs of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, to identify the barriers to providing equity of care and to prioritize reasonable adjustments. The four following barriers emerged from these meetings: Lack of awareness of healthcare professionals on specific health issues for patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities, which resulted in a poor healthcare coordination and reduced quality of care. Communication and information transmission issues between hospital staff, families and supported residential accommodations. Lack of training or insufficient training of healthcare professionals and hospital staff on intellectual and developmental disabilities. Inaccessibility of the hospital facilities and buildings for patients with disabilities Secondly, arising from these priorities, interventions were developed. Findings The interventions were eventually applied throughout the hospital. Recommendations and reasonable adjustments were made to provide accessibility and equity of care for patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Conclusion The Disability Project has achieved many reasonable adjustments in an acute care setting to provide good care and satisfaction for this population and their families.

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Short-term and working memory (WM) capacities are subject to change with ageing, both in normal older adults and in patients with degenerative or non-degenerative neurological disease. Few normative data are available for comparisons of short-term and WM capacities in the verbal, spatial and visual domains. To provide researchers and clinicians with a set of standardised tasks that assess short-term and WM using verbal and visuospatial materials, and to present normative data for that set of tasks. The present study compiled normative French data for three short-term memory tasks (verbal, visual and spatial simple span tasks) and two WM tasks (verbal and spatial complex span tasks) obtained from 445 healthy older adults aged between 55 and 85 years. Our data reveal main effects of age, education level and gender on older adults' short-term and WM performances. Equation-based normalisation can therefore be used to take these factors into account. The results provide a set of cut-off scores for five standardised tasks that can be used to determine the presence of short-term or WM impairment in older adults.