Entrustable professional activities

BACKGROUND: Feasible and effective assessment approaches to measuring competency in health sciences are vital in competency-based education. Educational programmes for health professions in low- and middle-income countries are increasingly adopting competency-based education as a strategy for training health professionals. Importantly, the organisation of assessments and assessment approaches must align with the available resources and still result in the fidelity of implementation. A review of existing assessment approaches, frameworks, models, and methods is essential for the development of feasible and effective assessment approaches in low-resource settings...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

INTRODUCTION: Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are tasks or responsibilities within a specific field that can be given to a learner once they are competent to perform them independently. EPAs are being used in various specialty programs and serving as valuable tool to inform educational program. However, due to disparities in professional practice between different contexts, the automatic transfer of a set of core EPAs is not feasible. Hence, our study aims to develop an EPA framework to inform the Family Planning and Reproductive Health Fellowship Program in the local context of Ethiopia...

BACKGROUND: It is essential that medical education (MedEd) fellows achieve desired outcomes prior to graduation. Despite the increase in postgraduate MedEd fellowships in emergency medicine (EM), there is no consistently applied competency framework. We sought to develop entrustable professional activities (EPAs) for EM MedEd fellows. METHODS: From 2021 to 2022, we used a modified Delphi method to achieve consensus for EPAs. EM education experts generated an initial list of 173 EPAs after literature review...

PURPOSE: The authors describe use of the workplace-based assessment (WBA) coactivity scale according to entrustable professional activities (EPAs) and assessor type to examine how diverse assessors rate medical students using WBAs. METHOD: A WBA data collection system was launched at Oregon Health and Science University to visualize learner competency in various clinical settings to foster EPA assessment. WBA data from January 14 to June 18, 2021, for medical students (all years) were analyzed...

BACKGROUND: Recently, all medical universities in Sweden jointly developed a framework for Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) for work-based training and assessment. This framework is now being introduced nationally in the new 6-year undergraduate medical programme that directly lead to a licence to practise. When EPAs are introduced, it is of central importance to gain clinical supervisors' acceptance to apply the framework in their supervision of students. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate how clinical supervisors, not familiar with EPAs, experience clinical supervision using the framework for EPAs...

OBJECTIVES: To define consensus entrustable professional activities (EPAs) for neurocritical care (NCC) advanced practice providers (APPs), establish validity evidence for the EPAs, and evaluate factors that inform entrustment expectations of NCC APP supervisors. DESIGN: A three-round modified Delphi consensus process followed by application of the EQual rubric and assessment of generalizability by clinicians not affiliated with academic medical centers. SETTING: Electronic surveys...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Competency-based education (CBE) is an emerging topic within physical therapy (PT). It has emerged to assure all stakeholders that physical therapist education program graduates are proficient in the requisite knowledge, skills, and behaviors (KSBs) essential for entry-level practice. Competencies have existed within cardiovascular and pulmonary (CVP) PT since 1980, updated in 2008, and most recently updated in 2022. This article discusses how individuals should apply the 2022 CVP competencies to clinical practice and education...

IMPORTANCE: Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) compose a competency-based education (CBE) assessment framework that has been increasingly adopted across medical specialties as a workplace-based assessment tool. EPAs focus on directly observed behaviors to determine the level of entrustment a trainee has for a given activity of that specialty. In this narrative review, we highlight the rationale for EPAs in general surgery, describe current evidence supporting their use, and outline some of the practical considerations for EPAs among residency programs, faculty, and trainees...

BACKGROUND & AIM: Echocardiography education involves the teaching and assessment of multiple competencies to ensure work-ready graduates. To connect these competency standards to professional practice, it is important that the industry expectation around specific entrustable professional activities (EPAs) is determined. In Australia, echocardiography examinations are eligible for Medicare reimbursement when performed by sonographers listed on the Australian Sonographers Accreditation Registry (ASAR), either as an Accredited Medical Sonographer or as an Accredited Student Sonographer...

Transperineal fusion prostate biopsy has a considerable learning curve (LC). Robotic-assisted transperineal MRI/Ultrasound fusion-guided biopsy (RA-TP-FBx) may have an easier LC due to automatization. We aimed to assess the LC of RA-TP-FBx and analyze its most difficult steps. We prospectively analyzed cases randomized to a biopsy-naïve urology resident, the chief resident, and an expert urologist in RA-TP-FBx (controls). We also analyzed consecutive cases in the LC of the expert. The LC was defined by procedure time, PCa detection rate (including stratification by PI-RADS), entrustable professional activities (EPA) assessment scores, and the NASA task load index...

Longitudinal academic advising (AA) and coaching programs are increasingly implemented in competency based medical education (CBME) to help residents reflect and act on the voluminous assessment data they receive. Documents created by residents for purposes of reflection are often used for a second, summative purpose-to help competence committees make decisions-which may be problematic. Using inductive, thematic analysis we analyzed written comments generated by 21 resident-AA dyads in one large internal medicine program who met over a 2 year period to determine what residents write when asked to reflect, how this aligns with what the AAs report, and what changes occur over time (total 109 resident self-reflections and 105 AA reports)...

BACKGROUND: Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) allow for the assessment of specific, observable, essential tasks in medical education. Since being developed in non-surgical fields, EPA assessments have been implemented in surgery to explore intraoperative entrustment. However, assessment burden is a significant problem for faculty, and it is unknown whether EPA assessments enable formative technical feedback. EPAs' formative utility could inform how surgical programs facilitate technical feedback for trainees...

BACKGROUND: There is growing interest in use of entrustable professional activity (EPA)-grounded workplace-based assessments (WBAs) to assess medical students through direct observation in the clinical setting. However, there has been very little reflection on how these tools are received by the faculty using them to deliver feedback. Faculty acceptance of WBAs is fundamentally important to sustained utilisation in the clinical setting, and understanding faculty perceptions of the WBA as an adjunct for giving targeted feedback is necessary to guide future faculty development in this area...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The goal of vascular surgery education is to provide the best possible training to vascular residents and fellows and to assure the highest standards of care for patients with vascular disease. In the USA, the currently used Vascular Surgery Milestones Program includes milestones as set targets at five levels, from novice to expertise, to assess the trainees' performance in knowledge, skills, attitudes, and other attributes of competencies. Competencies are broad and foundational domains of ability, the most important being the care of the patient...

OBJECTIVE: Operative coaching (OC) may facilitate improvement of surgery residents' competencies by optimizing learning and teaching. We investigated how residents' operative skills and prospective entrustment (PE) progress throughout the chief year in our OC program, how OC is perceived by participants, and how OC may facilitate learning and teaching. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This is a mixed-methods study conducted within the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center General Surgery residency...

INTRODUCTION: Most health care providers will be involved in a medical error during their careers. It is critical that future physicians receive formal training on error disclosure. METHODS: We designed a formative skills-based objective standardized clinical exam (OSCE) for fourth-year medical students to assess competence in disclosing an error during a required entrustable professional activity. Faculty observed the encounter and completed a checklist evaluating students' performance in communication skills and content knowledge...

In the past two decades, competency-based medical education (CBME) has rapidly become the cornerstone of medical training and accreditation programmes worldwide. It has increasingly replaced traditional time-based educational approaches which were often rigid, fragmented, and overly emphasized clinical content knowledge over practical skillsets and attitudes. CBME adoption was in the hope of better preparing medical graduates for the demands and responsibilities of real-world clinical practice. For all the supposed merits of CBME, there hitherto remains difficulties in arriving at comprehensive and practical 'competency' definitions, and actual challenges with implementation of clinical competency assessment modalities pertaining to construct validity, reliability, and applicability with the use and interpretation of evaluation metrics...