Improving Quality of PrEP Counseling for Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Kenya With Standardized Patient Actors: A Dose–Response Analysis

Background: Health care worker (HCW) training using standardized patient actors (SPs) is an evidence-based approach for improving patient–provider interactions. We evaluated whether SP training among HCWs in Western Kenya improved the quality of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) counseling for adolescent girls and young women (AGYW). Methods: We conducted a 2-day SP training intervention among HCWs providing PrEP counseling for AGYW. Six trained SPs role played one encounter each with HCWs following scripts depicting common PrEP-seeking scenarios. SPs used checklists to report and discuss domains of adherence to national PrEP guidelines, communication, and interpersonal skills using validated scales after each encounter. HCWs presented to each case in a random order. Overall and domain-specific mean score percentages were compared between the first and subsequent case encounters using generalized linear models, clustering by HCWs. Results: During 564 training cases among 94 HCWs, the overall mean quality of PrEP counseling score was 83.1 (SD: 10.1); scores improved over the course of the 6 encounters (P
Source: JAIDS Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes - Category: Infectious Diseases Tags: Prevention Research Source Type: research