Family Planning Counseling and Simulation

November 18, 2025 updated by: Döndü BATKIN ERTÜRK, Tokat Gaziosmanpasa University

Midwifery Students' Family Planning Counseling and Material Development Skills and the Effectiveness of Standardized Patient Simulation and Peer Simulation

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.

Study Overview

Status

Completed

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Detailed Description

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.

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

96

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • Turkey (Türkiye)
    • Central
      • Tokat Province, Central, Turkey (Türkiye), 60250
        • Tokat Gaziosmanpaşa Üniversitesi

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

  • Child
  • Adult
  • Older Adult

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

No

Description

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

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Health Services Research
  • Allocation: Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: None (Open Label)

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
No Intervention: Control Group
No intervention was made
Experimental: Standardized Patient Group
Trained with SP in simulation sessions
Behavioral: 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
Experimental: Peer Simulation Group
Trained with a peer in simulation sessions
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

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
State/Trait Anxiety Inventory
Time Frame: Pre-simulation (Baseline) and Pre-family planning counseling
  1. Not at all,
  2. A little,
  3. A lot, and 4) Completely
Pre-simulation (Baseline) and Pre-family planning counseling
General Counseling Evaluation Form in Family Planning
Time Frame: Throughout family planning counseling-10 minutes

"1 = needs improvement" (steps are implemented incorrectly or skipped),

"2 = adequate" (steps are implemented correctly and in the correct order, but progress from step to step is not smooth),

"3 = mastered" (steps are implemented correctly and in the correct order, and progress is smooth from step to step)
Throughout family planning counseling-10 minutes
Patient Education Material Evaluation Tool
Time Frame: Pre-family planning counseling- 5 minutes
Disagree = 0 points Agree = 1 point No Rating
Pre-family planning counseling- 5 minutes

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

Tokat Gaziosmanpasa University

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Döndü BATKIN ERTÜRK, Assist.Prof., Tokat Gaziosmanpasa University

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

May 6, 2025

Primary Completion (Actual)

May 9, 2025

Study Completion (Actual)

May 28, 2025

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

November 13, 2025

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

November 13, 2025

First Posted (Estimated)

November 14, 2025

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

November 24, 2025

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

November 18, 2025

Last Verified

November 1, 2025

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Other Study ID Numbers

  • TOKAT05

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

NO

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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