Since the age of pregnant women is increasing throughout Europe it is of crucial importance to preserve their ability for conception in late 30ies. Therefore, it is time to bring lifelong fertility education to a new level by creating tools for educators. This project will bridge the gap in health education; now the youth are not being continuously counselled until they decide it is time for a child. Preconception health is recognised as a critical component of life course health development of women and men in reproductive age. Preconception health and care (PCHC) focus on men and women before pregnancy. The years before pregnancy are of great importance to fertility, healthy pregnancy and to the health of the baby. The increase in wellbeing in Europe and throughout the world has brought up a notable need to strengthen young adults’ preconception health, which has in its part, significantly decreased. This growing societal problem is evident also in developing countries as the gap between different people groups are vast. The shift in culture and lifestyle has brought the increasing infertility problem into light with force. The challenge and need to increase fertility awareness can only be met with input into high quality higher education. Young adults (aged 18-40) postpone having children without proper knowledge, how age and cumulative health problems and lifestyle choices (obesity, substance abuse, smoking, inactivity, diseases) strip natural fertility. Infertility treatments and pregnancy complications increase and the number of children in families remain smaller than hoped for. The birth rate decreases, and some couples remain childless against their will. Delayed parenthood can be a choice for the couples with better income, but socio-economic problems, educational and cultural inequality may play its part in the inability for couples to receive reliable information to support their decisions and lifestyle choices. Good fertility health is in the core of life course health development, even if the choice is not to have children. The subject is highly sensitive, therefore empowering health professionals to execute quality guidance and offer reliable knowledge is crucial. The preparedness to guide fertility awareness and counsel how to retain reproductive abilities when postponing the parenthood later in life contains evidence-based knowledge, competencies and skills to do it. We intend to develop in this project all the necessary information and training for health professionals to be equipped for adequate counselling. We will also develop innovative digital educational material, inter alia a handbook, which builds a sustainable flexible system that allows distance learning, independent learning, or can be offered as a module or integrated to many subjects throughout all studies for nurses, midwives, public health nurses and school nurses. The answer to bridge the gaps in education and in health promotion guidance is to develop health professionals' education. As the result of this project our new approach will lead to a comprehensive European PCHC-model for teaching and learning preconception health and care in health care education on higher level. The PCHC-model will frame the content, delimit the area of PCHC and define the elements of PCHC. Later it will serve as the guide to plan the content, teaching strategies and learning outcomes of PCHC. PCHC-model and its elements can be a framework for a course or the content parts of PCHC-model can be integrated into other subjects. All products will be found in digital open access community platform and can be used also in distance learning courses. Partners will develop innovative digital tools for teaching this subject and e-learning activity packages for independent studies and for distance learning. These e-learning packages can also be used as pre-studies if learning is guided according to Flipped classroom method. This project will create a digital platform, Community of best practices, a type of website, where discussing, sharing and publishing will happen and evolve and it will serve as an open access forum for the participants. Later it will offer an open access for all. It will be also as a digital library where teachers are able to pick up the content for their teaching. Each participating countries' sexual and reproductive statistics will improve because of increased fertility awareness, which leads to healthier pregnancies and less complications. Also birth rate may increase when natural fertility is protected. Financial benefits can be enormous when people understand the meaning of good preconception health and right timing of pregnancy. The amount of vain fertility treatments will decrease, women are healthier and have less complications during pregnancy, and the most important result is that new-born babies get the best start to their lives. On personal level hidden worries, sorrow and conflicts in families will be avoided.
At the heart of this project was common European concern that the age of first-time mothers had risen steadily throughout the 21st century, while fertility has declined. To postpone having children during the last fertile years increases complications, involuntary infertility and the desired number of children might not be realized. Adolescents and adults have no sufficient understanding of the factors affecting preconception health and fertility, but they have lot of misinformation. Professional guidance is needed. Scientists have been discussing in their own circles, but little attention has been paid to concretize the obscurity of the research findings. In the start-up year of this project, international researchers clearly expressed the need to bring knowledge of fertility awareness to young adults, but the health care structures, and professionals’ competences did not support it. Fertility protection is a critical component in life course health development. Guidance touches on personal choices and must be based on evidence and professionally delivered. Unfortunately, little of Preconception Health and Care (PCHC) content was found in curricula for midwives and nurses in Europe. It was time to bring Lifelong fertility education to a new level by creating tools for educators. We also found the need to expand the concept of PCHC in three dimensions: to whom, what and when. For years the focus has been on the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. These are important issues, but not enough to protect reproductive health and fertility. Counselling has been aimed at girls and women, but it is equally important to motivate boys and men to protect their fertility. Experts agree that preconception counselling 3 months before pregnancy is too late. Our objective was to bridge the gap in education: to create the PCHC-model and define the PCHC-competences to guide curriculum development and teaching of health care professionals. Our target was to develop teachers’ competences and skills in teaching PCHC-themes, by collecting all necessary evidence-based information and developing innovative digital teaching materials to be situated in one open access PCHC-platform that allows also flexible possibilities to distance learning. The result in future will be that new professionals will be equipped for adequate counselling and guidance of their clients. This will bridge the gap between science and clients. Participants were 5 universities in 4 European countries: TAMK, Finland; VIVES, Belgium; CUAS, Austria; UP and UL; Slovenia. We had 7 Project Meetings and arranged 5 Multiplier Events. Common meetings were the forum where we created our innovative products, in the meantime participants worked with their chosen topics. Our main work was to review and analyze scientific knowledge and transform it to fit to the end-users. Covid 19 disrupted and partly hampered the implementation of the project and the organization of activities 2/2020 - 12/2022. Dissemination of the PCHC-model and other outputs started already in the second meeting/event and continued through the project. First our focus was on health care teachers and students, later adult education, and young adults wherever. Towards the end of the project, we realized that we needed to be more active as part of society. The actors left e.g. to schools to talk and share project outputs. We disseminated the project and its outputs in informal and official contexts in our own universities and through our own national and international contacts, social media, national and international conferences, articles in newspapers, professional and scientific journals. O1 - We created PCHC-model: Honeycomb-model, which simplifies the complex phenomena and summarizes the factors which effect to fertility. The model is visual and flexible, easy to use in different contexts. O2 - We built PCHC-Platform (https://preco.tamk.fi), which serves as an open access platform for teaching and learning on different levels of education. All project products, activities and the blog can be found there. Already 44000 visits during the first year O3 - We made 53 PCHC -e-tools and wrote a comprehensive PCHC-handbook. These products cover the PCHC subject on every level The project provided a new perspective on the popularization of science and the potential of the digital environment as a part of university teaching. As a result of the project, we made changes to the curricula of midwifery and nursing education and to the teaching the health promotion content. At national and international conferences, many were interested in implementing PCHC ideas into teaching and curricula. It can be concluded that the PCHC model, e-tools, and handbook crucially developed the competence of project actors in PCHC thinking and teaching. On the other hand, the creation of e-tools and the implementation of the Platform increased the ICT competences of the actors.