Providing a rationale for product solutions is becoming increasingly common as commissioners and additional stakeholders investigate the cost and practices of stoma care. In this paper, Nick Buckle introduces a stoma assessment tool that could provide expert health-care professionals with a framework to support clinical assessments and validate their product selection in a way that can be easily communicated to non-stomal experts, be they health-care professionals, commissioners or the patients themselves. The tool is designed for use in everyday practice and captures the experiential knowledge of the expert stoma care nurse in a concise and easy-to-interpret format.