Development of written health education materials: a review

Written health education materials (WHEMs), such as pamphlets, are widely used in the field of health education in terms of both the wide variety of topics they cover and the large number produced. The New South Wales Cancer Council distributes more than one million print items annually, a large proportion of which are pamphlets1. The development and distribution of pamphlets involves considerable costs. For example, in the US, $14.3 million was spent on the one-off distribution of an AIDS brochure in a nation-wide education campaign2. A survey of pamphlets produced in NSW found development costs ranged from $120 to $8000, with a mean cost of $37973.