This thesis is part of a project involving outpatient services for the elderly and disabled people in the City of Vantaa. The thesis is a functional thesis, which was done in cooperation with the community nursing services of the City of Vantaa. The number of multicultural patients coming from different cultural backgrounds is growing in Finland. Thus, also the need for education related to transcultural palliative care among the healthcare professionals continues to increase.

The purpose of this thesis is to develop transcultural palliative care by designing a guidebook, which answers to the needs of the community nursing services of the City of Vantaa. The aim of this thesis is to improve the abilities of the healthcare professionals to provide palliative care to a multicultural patient at home. The wider aim is to improve equal treatment and to secure the same quality of treatment also to the patient from another culture.

The content of the thesis is based on the theoretical framework, description of the developing process, and evaluation. The developing process of the guidebook contains the design phase, prototyping and evaluation. The healthcare professionals took part in the developing process. The design phase interview was made with two head nurses and the prototype evaluation was made together with community nurses. The prototype was evaluated through a questionnaire inquiry and an informal evaluation discussion. The thirteen community nurses responded to the inquiry and three nurses took part in the evaluation discussion.

The results show that the healthcare professionals were mostly satisfied with the content and ap-pearance of the guidebook. The healthcare professionals agreed fully or partially that the guidebook directs the good and successful encounter with the patient. The majority of the respondents agreed or partly agreed that the guide provides current information about the multicultural palliative care. According to the respondents some information on practical work should be included in the guide book. The opinions were divergent about language support. The respondents wished more language support, e.g. vocabularies in other languages than English. The evaluation results affected finishing the guide book, the spelling was reviewed and changes were made to the head-ings and sentence structures. According to the thesis the nurses’ language competence and the patient's perspective in the successful palliative care at home could be studied further.