Approaches to the systematic co-development of health education interventions on oral cancer: A literature review

Oral cancer remains a significant global health concern due to a lack of adequate awareness and knowledge of the disease. To address this, the use of comprehensive and inclusive health education interventions on oral cancer has been widely recommended. However, most of the current health education interventions (published between 2020 and 2024) on oral cancer were not highly impactful, and a major implicated factor was the lack of stakeholder engagement in the development process of those interventions. Due to the lack of stakeholders’ engagement in those interventions, the quality of the educational content delivered in most of those interventions was neither comprehensive nor highly effective. The approach of co-development in health education interventions enhances intervention effectiveness through equity promotion, community empowerment, its contextual relevance, public trust and ownership, and long-term sustainability. In this review, key approaches that could be used to co-develop health education interventions on oral cancer were elaborately presented. This review explicitly describes the three common approaches – theory-based (theory of planned behavior, normalization process theory), model-based (Predisposing, reinforcing, and enabling constructs in educational/environmental diagnosis and evaluation-policy, regulatory, and organizational constructs in educational and environmental development model, and behavior change wheel model), and partnership-based approaches (community-based participatory research and experience-based co-design) – with a set of proposed steps which can be utilized for co-developing health education interventions on oral cancer.