Standardized patients in antenatal history taking: bridging simulation and clinical practice: a narrative review

Abstract

Antenatal history taking is a main competency in obstetric education, requiring integration of communication skills, clinical reasoning, professionalism and patient centred care. Traditional bedside teaching alone may not provide required opportunities for repetitive practice because of limited patient availability, ethical considerations and variability in clinical exposure. Simulation based education using standardized patients (SPs) has emerged as effective strategy to address these challenges by providing realistic, standardized and safe learning environments. To examine the evidence for the role of SPs in teaching antenatal history taking and also review their educational use, benefits, challenges of implementation and future prospects in competency based obstetric education. A narrative review of recent open access literature (2023-2026) was performed. A critical review and synthesis of relevant articles on SPs, simulation based learning, competency based medical education, communication skills and obstetric education were performed to give an evidence based overview of the educational role of SPs in antenatal history taking training. Available evidence consistently indicates that using SPs improves communication skills, history taking ability, learner confidence, professionalism and clinical competence. SP based learning offers opportunities for deliberate practice, immediate feedback, reflective learning, and standardized competency assessment. Recent innovations such as teacher SPs and virtual patient technologies add to the further improvement of simulation based education and are complementary to conventional clinical teaching. SPs can be a valuable educational approach to teach antenatal history taking within Competency Based Medical Education. The inclusion of this teaching strategy within the curriculum of undergraduate and postgraduate education in obstetrics will facilitate the development of communication skills, competency-based evaluation and preparation for the practical situations.