Consensus on the provision of evidence-based community stroke rehabilitation has been reached. Commissioning services with a clearly defined remit, which can deliver tailored care to individual stroke patients, is a challenge that needs further exploration.

There is widespread recognition that simply publishing research findings is not enough to ensure that they are carried into clinical practice. One response to this has been the burgeoning "guidelines movement" of recent years, which has now reached the stage of generating guidelines for the production of guidelines. Argues that guidelines, and other forms of intervention to change clinical practice in an evidence-based direction, will succeed only to the extent that they engage actively with the real world of clinical decision making. This world is more complex than guidelines writers acknowledge, and includes economic, administrative, professional and personal incentives as well as those provided by research evidence. Engaging with this real world may be difficult, but it opens up new possibilities for understanding how clinicians act and how evidence may be used to inform clinical practice. Such possibilities include social influences, educational outreach, providing information to patients, negotiating local coalitions on specific issues and changing the administrative environment.

This paper dicusses the experience of a team in Sheffield who have established a 3‐year programme, the FACTS project, which aims to develop a framework for changing clinical practice in primary care. The lessons learnt from the project, which involves a variety of change techniques, are described including the need to tailor programmes to local needs and cultures as well as the use of marketing as a strategy for change.