The 11th EFPW took place in December 2003 at Heraklion in Crete, hosted by the Association EURATOM-Greece and the FORTH Institute, Heraklion and sponsored by the European Commission. Within the overall theme of 'plasma–wall interactions (PWI) and their implications for impurity generation and transport', four topics of importance to the future development of magnetically confined fusion were discussed in detail. Key PWI issues for ITER were also reviewed, the programmes of the two European physics task forces, on PWI and on integrated tokamak modelling, were discussed, and several topical reviews on key physics R&D issues for ITER were presented. The main issues discussed and the areas identified as requiring further study are summarized here.