abstract: The Netherlands has had national guidelines for the prevention of pressure sores since 1985, and they were updated in 1992, yet concern persists that they are not as widely known as they should be. This qualitative study involved the researchers conducting interviews in five nursing homes with a sample of enrolled nurses, staff nurses, team leaders, head nurses, and physicians. As had been suggested prior to undertaking the research, many of the nurses had not heard of the organisation that draws up clinical guidelines in the Netherlands, and were not familiar with its specific guidance on pressure sore prevention. By contrast, all the physicians were well-informed about both, but they still sometimes condoned ineffective practices, such as massaging the skin, in the hope that it would encourage skin inspection. One barrier to the wider dissemination of information on evidence-based care was the perception that nursing journals held a negative view of nursing homes, and the nurses who worked in them. As one enrolled nurse said, 'I subscribed to a nursing journal but I cancelled it, because it was mostly about hospitals, and almost nothing about nursing homes. If there was something about nursing homes, it was negative'.