Project Aims

This collaborative project will develop a European methodology to assess the implementation of research evidence into practice - the European Implementation Score (EIS) - in primary, secondary and specialist care from the perspectives of different target groups (users and carers, voluntary organisations, a range of health and social care professionals and health policy makers) using stroke as the main example. The transferability of the developed methodologies to coronary heart disease will be assessed.

The project aims to improve the health of European Union citizens, particularly the elderly, for a global health issue of public health and clinical importance, namely vascular disease, through multidisciplinary research to ensure the results of research in vascular health and disease management reach European Union citizens in a timely fashion.

The project will focus on developing tools for measuring implementation and for monitoring the effective diffusion of new research knowledge in the clinical field of stroke care but will validate the transferability of the developed methods using experiences from coronary heart disease. It is part of our concept to develop a theoretically derived implementation tool applicable across longer-term conditions but the clinical and research focus will initially be in vascular diseases, where we have an international track record in public health, health services and clinical research.

The project aims to advance the application of evidence-based healthcare in the diagnosis, management and secondary prevention of stroke and coronary heart disease. It will identify best practice in the implementation of evidence-based care at the patient (micro), organisation (meso) and national policy level (macro) across selected European primary and secondary care settings. The multidisciplinary research team includes users of healthcare, clinicians, public health physicians, epidemiologists, social scientists, health economists and statisticians along with representatives from 14 different stroke data sets in 9 European countries to address the aims.

The concept includes the following objectives:

  1. To coordinate and manage relevant European research expertise and data to address the project objectives (Work Package 1)
  2. To determine currently used methods of implementation of research evidence into practice in different European settings (Work Package 2)
  3. To develop the European Implementation Score (EIS) to estimate the degree of implementation of research evidence into practice (Work Package 3)
  4. To define performance measures for successful implementation of research evidence into practice (Work Package 4)
  5. To identify implementation methods determining the successful implementation of research evidence into practice (Work Package 5)
  6. To model cost effectiveness of different implementation recommendations (Work Package 6)
  7. To validate the transferability of developed methods to coronary heart disease (Work Package 7)
  8. To understand the role of users in implementing evidence into practice (Work Package 8)
  9. To develop recommendations for closing the research-practice gap (Work Package 9)