Development of a Joint-Specialty Simulation-Based Workshop to Optimize Counseling at Extreme Prematurity

Educational interventions addressing counseling at extreme prematurity to date have focused on single-specialty clinicians, overlooking the important communication and collaboration required by maternal-fetal medicine and neonatology for optimal counseling. This simulation-based workshop aimed to unite maternal-fetal and neonatology clinicians to enhance interspecialty-personalized and family-focused counseling at extreme prematurity.

We developed and conducted 3 half-day virtual workshops with neonatology and maternal-fetal medicine attendings and fellows utilizing a combination of didactics, scenarios with simulated participants, and facilitated debriefs, including a cofacilitator with lived patient-family neonatal intensive care unit experience.

A total of 26 clinicians participated in the 3 workshops. After the workshop, 92% of participants felt "more prepared" or "much more prepared" to have difficult conversations with families. Qualitative analysis of open-ended responses found key themes among participants, including increased adoption of parent-driven and personalized counseling approaches, enhanced interspecialty collaboration between maternal-fetal medicine and neonatology, and greater awareness of and efforts to mitigate bias in antenatal counseling.

This novel workshop facilitated interspecialty collaboration between maternal-fetal medicine and neonatology when counseling at extreme prematurity and emphasized relational skills, personalized counseling, and bias mitigation techniques.