Family Planning Counseling and Simulation

NCT ID: NCT07229183

Last Updated: 2025-11-24

Study Results

Results pending

The study team has not published outcome measurements, participant flow, or safety data for this trial yet. Check back later for updates.

Basic Information

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Recruitment Status

COMPLETED

Clinical Phase

NA

Total Enrollment

96 participants

Study Classification

INTERVENTIONAL

Study Start Date

2025-05-06

Study Completion Date

2025-05-28

Brief Summary

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The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the effects of standardized patient simulation and peer simulation on midwifery students' family planning counseling and material development skills.

The main questions it aims to answer are:

Do standardized patient simulation and peer simulation training affect midwifery students' family planning counseling skills?

Do standardized patient simulation and peer simulation training affect midwifery students' material development skills?

The researchers will compare simulation groups with a control group to determine whether simulation training improves midwifery students' family planning counseling and material development skills.

Participants:

For the peer simulation, three volunteer second-year midwifery students will portray a peer in the client role.

Three volunteer undergraduate/master's students with prior theater training will portray a standardized patient in the client role.

The control group, without receiving simulation training, will prepare educational material on general family planning counseling after the simulation sessions and present this material to their peers in a classroom setting as a counseling practice.

Simulation groups will complete the State/Trait Anxiety Inventory before simulation and family planning counseling, and the control group will complete the State/Trait Anxiety Inventory before family planning counseling.

Detailed Description

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The goal of family planning services is to improve pregnancy planning and spacing and to prevent unintended pregnancies. They enable individuals to achieve desired birth spacing and family size and contribute to improved health outcomes for children, women, and families. According to the World Health Organization (2014) and the United Nations (2014), all couples and individuals have the right to freely and responsibly decide on the number, spacing, and timing of their children and to have the information and tools necessary to do so. Family planning provides multifaceted benefits for women and their families.

It is unique among health interventions in terms of its breadth of health, development, and economic benefits, including reducing maternal and child mortality, empowering women and girls, and increasing environmental sustainability. Midwives play a crucial role in improving maternal and infant health and providing family planning and reproductive health services.

Family planning relies, in part, on the communication skills and attitudes of healthcare providers involved in counseling. A study demonstrated that a client-centered approach to family planning counseling, which fosters shared decision-making, builds trust, and explores client preferences, increases satisfaction and retention. Another study suggests that midwifery students need more practical training in contraception and sexual health.

The use of printed educational materials is recommended to supplement and reinforce health information commonly delivered orally, thereby increasing the effectiveness of health education. According to Bernier, written educational materials offer a number of advantages, including message consistency, reusability, portability, distribution flexibility, information retention, and cost-effectiveness of production and updating. Healthcare professionals should provide written health education materials designed according to best-practice principles in written health education material design and focused on the healthy/ill individual. Health education materials are only effective if they are read, understood, and remembered by healthy/ill individuals.

By writing their own educational materials, health educators can adapt content to the policies, procedures, and equipment of their respective institutions, create answers to frequently asked questions by healthy and sick individuals, emphasize points deemed particularly important by healthcare professionals, and reinforce specific verbal instructions that clarify difficult concepts and address specific healthy and sick needs.

In this context, enhancing midwifery students' material development skills is crucial.

Standardized patients are individuals who have received special training to accurately convey a patient's story so accurately that even experienced healthcare professionals cannot distinguish them from real patients. By embodying all the physical and psychological characteristics of real patients, they provide students with a holistic understanding of patient care. These individuals are frequently used in health sciences education to promote the development of communication skills and other core competencies.

They can consistently represent a wide variety of scenarios. Issues such as high cost, standardized patient training, and other limitations limit the use of standardized patients in health education. A potential alternative to standardized patients is to have students role-play the patient. Peer simulation is an advanced form of role-playing in which students are trained to role-play clinical scenarios for their peers. While there are studies examining the impact of simulation on improving family planning counseling, no studies have been found comparing the effectiveness of standardized patient simulation with peer simulation.

In addition, this study focuses on the ability to prepare educational materials on the subject as well as family planning counseling.

Conditions

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Educational Problems

Study Design

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Allocation Method

RANDOMIZED

Intervention Model

PARALLEL

Participants were divided into three groups: standardized patient simulation, peer simulation, and control group.
Primary Study Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Blinding Strategy

NONE

Study Groups

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Standardized Patient Group

Trained with SP in simulation sessions

Group Type EXPERIMENTAL

Standardized patient simulation practice

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

Creating family planning scenarios Preparing educational materials Identifying and training standardized patients on the scenarios Providing family planning counseling with standardized patients in simulation sessions accompanied by educational materials

Peer Simulation Group

Trained with a peer in simulation sessions

Group Type EXPERIMENTAL

Peer Simulation practice

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

Creating family planning scenarios Preparing educational materials Identifying and training peers on the scenarios Providing family planning counseling in simulation sessions with peers using educational materials

Control Group

No intervention was made

Group Type NO_INTERVENTION

No interventions assigned to this group

Interventions

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Standardized patient simulation practice

Creating family planning scenarios Preparing educational materials Identifying and training standardized patients on the scenarios Providing family planning counseling with standardized patients in simulation sessions accompanied by educational materials

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

Peer Simulation practice

Creating family planning scenarios Preparing educational materials Identifying and training peers on the scenarios Providing family planning counseling in simulation sessions with peers using educational materials

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

Eligibility Criteria

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Inclusion Criteria

* Students taking the course for the first time
* Students who agree to participate in the research
* Students who continue the theoretical part of the course

Exclusion Criteria

\- Students who did not attend simulation sessions
Eligible Sex

FEMALE

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

No

Sponsors

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Tokat Gaziosmanpasa University

OTHER

Sponsor Role lead

Responsible Party

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Döndü BATKIN ERTÜRK

Assistant professor

Responsibility Role PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR

Principal Investigators

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Döndü BATKIN ERTÜRK, Assist.Prof.

Role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR

Tokat Gaziosmanpaşa University

Locations

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Tokat Gaziosmanpaşa Üniversitesi

Tokat Province, Central, Turkey (Türkiye)

Site Status

Countries

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Turkey (Türkiye)

References

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Walker SH, Davis G. Knowledge and reported confidence of final year midwifery students regarding giving advice on contraception and sexual health. Midwifery. 2014 May;30(5):e169-76. doi: 10.1016/j.midw.2014.02.002. Epub 2014 Feb 25.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 24661469 (View on PubMed)

Sim, K. H. (2011). Tips for creating effective health education materials. The Journal of Korean Diabetes, 12(2), 99-103.

Reference Type BACKGROUND

Hoffmann T, Worrall L. Designing effective written health education materials: considerations for health professionals. Disabil Rehabil. 2004 Oct 7;26(19):1166-73. doi: 10.1080/09638280410001724816.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 15371031 (View on PubMed)

Hainsworth D. & Keyes K. Chapter 12: Instructional materials. In: Bastable SB. (ed.) Nurse as educator: Principles of teaching and learning for nursing practice, Fifth Edition Jones & Bartlett Learning; 2019. p 505-48.

Reference Type BACKGROUND

Ghorbani B, Jackson AC, Dehghan-Nayeri N, Bahramnezhad F. Standardized patients' experience of participating in medical students' education: a qualitative content analysis. BMC Med Educ. 2024 May 28;24(1):586. doi: 10.1186/s12909-024-05531-x.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 38807118 (View on PubMed)

Schivone GB, Glish LL. Contraceptive counseling for continuation and satisfaction. Curr Opin Obstet Gynecol. 2017 Dec;29(6):443-448. doi: 10.1097/GCO.0000000000000408.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 28938374 (View on PubMed)

Inurreta-Díaz, M., Morales-Gual, Y. M., Aguilar-Vargas, E., Álvarez-Baeza, A., Magriñá-Lizama, J. S., Cetina-Sauri, G., & Méndez-Domínguez, N. (2021). Family-Planning counselling simulation for medical students: An exploratory educational intervention. Educación médica, 22, 271-276.

Reference Type BACKGROUND

Sharma KA, Zangmo R, Kumari A, Roy KK, Bharti J. Family planning and abortion services in COVID 19 pandemic. Taiwan J Obstet Gynecol. 2020 Nov;59(6):808-811. doi: 10.1016/j.tjog.2020.09.005. Epub 2020 Sep 10.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 33218393 (View on PubMed)

Ensuring Human Rights in the Provision of Contraceptive Information and Services: Guidance and Recommendations. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2014. Available from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK195054/

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 24696891 (View on PubMed)

United Nations Population Fund (2023) Human Rights-Based Approach To Family Planning, UNFPA Support Tool. Available at: https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/UNFPA-HRBAtoFP-SupportTool-v231207.pdf Accessed:18 March 2025

Reference Type BACKGROUND

Şimşek Çetinkaya, Ş., Gümüş Çalış, G., Kıbrıs, Ş., & Topal, M. (2024). Effectiveness of virtual patient simulation versus peer simulation in family planning training in midwifery students: a comparative educational intervention. Interactive Learning Environments, 32(3), 942-951.

Reference Type BACKGROUND

Li Q, Rimon JG, Ahmed S. Capitalising on shared goals for family planning: a concordance assessment of two global initiatives using longitudinal statistical models. BMJ Open. 2019 Nov 12;9(11):e031425. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2019-031425.

Reference Type BACKGROUND
PMID: 31722946 (View on PubMed)

Other Identifiers

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TOKAT05

Identifier Type: -

Identifier Source: org_study_id

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