"New knowledge is not necessarily readily applied in medicine, even when there is evidence of its effectiveness. As a result of the gap between knowing and doing, policy makers, professional care providers, patients and their families have benefited too little from new developments. Implementation research has developed models for stepwise implementation but it is still unclear which strategies are effective for whom and which factors influence the effectiveness of implementation strategies.From the point of view of implementation sciences changing palliative care is a major challenge, since adequate organization of palliative care requires collaboration between a range of different professionals and healthcare organizations. Besides, as a consequence of the ageing population, the number of people in need for cancer and dementia palliative care will rise. Therefore we will focus on implementation strategies in palliative care.The overall aim of this project is to develop optimal implementation strategies for using quality indicators to improve the organization of palliative cancer and dementia care in Europe and to study factors influencing the effectiveness of the strategies. We will focus on the implementation process and concentrate the work packages on: the organization of palliative care, the development of a set of setting-specific implementation strategies including an interactive website and instruction by consultants, the evaluation of the use of selected strategies to improve the organization of palliative care and factors influencing the effectiveness of the implementation strategies.This information will be used to build a conceptual model that should be applicable across diverse healthcare settings and that allows rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of implementation strategies. Dissemination of the results will be enhanced by involving stakeholders, including two European networks related to the subject of this implementation process study."