INTRODUCTION: Healthcare organisations are nowadays expecting the support of IT in the daily routines. Personal digital assistants (PDAs) are in use in some healthcare organisations but in an irregular and unplanned way. The aim of the present study was to describe nurses' and nurse students' demands of functions and usability in a PDA. METHODS: Interviews were made with 12 nurses at the County Hospital of Kalmar and a questionnaire was given to nurse students (n=84) in their last, i.e. third, year at the Department of Health and Behavioural Sciences, University of Kalmar. RESULTS: There was a need for nurses to make the information in general more rich and efficient by means of a PDA. In a PDA, the nurses and nurse students expected access to information about the patients, knowledge resources and functions for their daily work. CONCLUSIONS: The nurses and nurse students had high expectations of a PDA for information retrieval. A PDA has the potential to be accepted as a supportive tool in healthcare organisations if it contains the demanded content which must be adapted to the users' needs and the general IT-system used, and the PDA must have a user friendly design.