Planning, Development, and Evaluation of a Public Health Newsletter for Primary Care Healthcare Workers in a Regional City in Victoria, Australia

Continuing medical education must stimulate and maintain the interest and participation of physicians, by identifying and meeting their educational needs. Educational material for busy professionals must be concise with a format suited to the reading audience. Public Health newsletters have the potential to reach a large audience, and are not costly to prepare. There has never been such a Public Health newsletter available for community healthcare workers in our regional city of Geelong, in Victoria, Australia. This thesis explores the key stages involved in planning, developing, and evaluating a Public Health newsletter for healthcare Workers in this region. A working party, developed in 2008, oversaw the creation of a vision, format and content for the monthly newsletter which launched in February 2009. An evaluation of the newsletter was undertaken in February 2010 via a survey to gauge the utility and relevance of the newsletter. More than 80% of respondents found the newsletter useful, interesting, informative and relevant to their practice, and nearly 90% thought the bulletin was the right length. Positive feedback was also received about the inclusion of pictures and graphs in the newsletter. The newsletter continues to expand both its list of contributing authors and its distribution list. Further evaluations may be required in the future to determine the direction of the newsletter.Master of Public Healt