Family Planning Counseling and Simulation

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.

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