Background Guidelines do not implement themselves. Structural implementation activities are necessary to improve the usage of guidelines by professionals. At a national level this centre oversees the development, implementation, and evaluation of the Preventive Child Health Care (PCHC) guidelines.

Context In The Netherlands, PCHC is provided by 50 organisations. They use guidelines to improve quality of care, however implementing them, which is their own responsibility, is difficult. They therefore want implementation support, which is then provided by the Dutch Centre for Child Health.

Description of Best Practice To support PCHC organisations implementing guidelines, the Dutch Centre for Child Health developed an implementation structure. The aim of this structure is to provide a systematic implementation through various strategies. The elements of this structure are: a network of implementation coordinators, an implementation toolkit, education and e-learning, a helpdesk, and collaboration with educational institutes and network partners in the youth field. A one year follow-up survey showed that managers and implementation coordinators from PCHC organisations are positive about the support. They want our implementation activities to be continued and even like to see the support extended to guideline maintenance.

Lessons for Guideline Developers, Adaptors, Implementers, and/or Users organisations want support, to implement guidelines into their own organisation. Beside that they want to know what and when to expect. Our way to achieve that, is to give the support through a clear implementation structure and to provide systematic implementation activities.