“I liked having my voice heard:” a feasible, rapid approach for codesigning a contraceptive counseling curriculum

Few youth- and family-engaged codesigned models of medical education programs exist. One area that may benefit from community perspectives is designing education to improve counseling on sensitive topics. The authors' codesigned an adolescent-focused contraceptive counseling continuing medical education training program for practicing primary care clinicians in partnership with community advisory boards and assessed the feasibility and acceptability of their codesign approach. From September 2023 to January 2024, the authors recruited female teens, caregivers, and clinicians residing in North Carolina to participate as members of a teen, caregiver, or clinician virtual advisory board. Across 5 meetings for each advisory board (15 total) held virtually for 1 hour per month from January to May 2024, they used human-centered design principles to elicit and integrate advisor priorities and feedback into a final training program. At their final meetings, they facilitated group discussions and used rapid qualitative analysis to understand advisors' experiences in medical education curriculum codevelopment. Overall, they partnered with 20 advisors of diverse identities across geographic location, race and ethnicity, sexuality, and experiences with chronic conditions and/or disability. Together, they developed a 3-hour virtual, synchronous training program for primary care clinicians treating adolescents to improve their contraceptive counseling skills. The training program included 5 modules on different components of adolescent contraceptive care complemented by a continuously updated resource toolkit. Advisors described positive experiences with the advisory boards and identified actionable opportunities for improvement, such as additional technical support with online collaborative platforms. The authors created a successful partnership with 3 advisory boards to rapidly generate a clinician-facing continuing medical education program that incorporated the priorities and experiences of those most impacted by their training. This approach can be adapted to other clinician training curricula to ensure that relevant community voices are centered in medical education at all training levels.