A self-instructional slide/tape program entitled "Idiopathic Scoliosis: Guide for Teaching Parents, Children and Health Care Personnel" was created for an audience of nurse-trainees, physicians, and laypeople in British Columbia, Canada. Designed to assist these groups in understanding the nature, history, and treatment of the disease, the program's content and illustrations reflect the response given in preliminary interviews by parents whose children were being treated for scoliosis, and the finished program was evaluated for effectiveness as a teaching/learning tool before it was distributed to children's and adult hospitals, public health clinics, and teaching institutions for health care professionals. Printed media developed to accompany the program were designed for use as an instructional package to enable physicians and public health nurses to establish screening programs across the province. In order to adapt this package for use by nurses and physicians in Jamaica and other West Indian nations, a number of changes would be required. These changes which would be primarily cosmetic and would only affect the program inconsequentially, would be most noticeable in the needs assessment, testing, and distribution phases, and would reflect the difference in the decision-making processes between advanced and developing countries. The changes suggest that instructional development processes for developing countries must reflect factors not usually included in Western models. (LMM)