The knowledge of immigrants for self-care medicines is found to be inadequate. This bachelor’s thesis aim is to contribute by the produced guiding material to immigrants knowledge of self-care of the most common infections of children and the self-care medication available to those. The key topics of this bachelor’s thesis are multicultural nursing, the most common infections of children, self-care and self-care medicines in Finland.

The subscriber of the thesis was the City of Oulu, health care of the immigrants. Their need was to get the health counselling for immigrants in Finland for non-prescription medicines. Also the need was to increase the knowledge of immigrants about self-care of most common infections in child care point of view.

The aim was to develop a guiding material for nurses use in public health-care for immigrants. By the guiding material and the given counselling, the integrating immigrant families health awareness and health, through a child care perspective can be improved. In this thesis the special characteristics of cultures were taken into consideration when offering the counselling.

The bachelor’s thesis was implemented as a project. The project consisted of a report as a written part, a guiding material as a product, and a counselling session for immigrant mothers as a testing phase of the guiding material. Internet publications, field of literature and articles were used as a source. Generated guiding material was collected from theoretical knowledge, as well as the needs found by a subscriber and the authors. To support the developed guiding material this report takes into consideration also the cultural factors in multicultural counselling.

The guiding material was handed over to City of Oulu, health care for immigrants. The material discloses briefly the symptoms of the most common infections in children, self-care, available self-care medications and situations when to contact health care providers. In addition the material highlighted the specific features of medication for children, as well as the safe use of self-care medication. The guiding material was evaluated as a small-scale survey by public care nurses' health care for immigrants in Oulu, as well as immigrants that participated the counselling session. Based on this feedback, it is noticed that the immigrants need more counselling for the safe use of medication.