Self-health management programmes have been introduced as a method for containing today's accelerating healthcare costs. Self-care programmes in the workplace have been shown to reduce high-risk behaviours and healthcare costs not only for employees but also for their families.‘There are tonnes of data to support the cost effectiveness of self-health management programmes’,said Dr Don Powell, president of the American Institute for Preventive Medicine at the Disease Management Congress [New York, US; June 1997]. He believes that the key to successful self-health programmes is to teach the consumer to make better healthcare decisions. The Personal Health Improvement Program developed at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and offered by Procter & Gamble has proven to be cost effective for patients with somatoform disorders. The outcomes associated with this self-health programme were presented at the meeting.