Improving end-of-life care in nursing homes: implementation and evaluation of an intervention to sustain quality of care.

Background: Internationally, policy calls for care homes to provide reliably good end-of-life care. We undertook a 20-month project to sustain palliative care improvements achieved by a previous intervention.

Aim: To sustain a high standard of palliative care in seven UK nursing care homes using a lower level of support than employed during the original project and to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention.