Our bachelor's thesis was a product development project, which aimed to produce teaching material for Oulu University of Applied Sciences. The subject of our project came up from the needs of nursing teachers and students at Oulu University of Applied Sciences. We wanted to produce material about systematic examination of patients which would help students in practical training and in working life. Our goal was to create a good quality and easy to use guide that a student could carry with him. Our long-term goal is to solidify the use of ABCD Protocol in patient examination in the School of Health and Social Care of Oulu University of Applied Sciences.

The product is an eight page pocket guide which deals with the topic in the same order as the patient examination should be executed, starting from the assessment of a patient's neurological status and going through more accurate evaluation of the patient's condition in sections (ABCD). The ABCD Protocol was developed as a mnemonic for a patient’s examination in the United States as a part of Advanced Trauma Life Support training program. The acronym ABCD comes from the words airway, breathing, circulation and disability. On the last page of the guide there is a checklist about the process to manage an emergency situation. The pocket guide was pre-tested with a small group of nursing students and finished on the basis of the test results.

The goals which were set to the project were accomplished well. The beneficiaries of our product are the nursing and health care students and teachers. The pocket guide was handed over to Oulu University of Applied Sciences in an electronic form and will hopefully be used actively. We also wrote the instructions on how to print out the guide. In the future these kinds of guide books could be developed for different specialization fields of nursing studies and for workplaces to help in the orientation of new staff.