Entrustable Professional Activities: A Faculty Development Workshop for Adding EPAs Into Your Medical Trainee's Assessment Portfolio

Abstract

IntroductionThe last 3 decades have seen significant changes in medical education and corresponding assessment of medical trainees. Competency-based medical education provided a more comprehensive model than the previous time-based process but remained insufficient. Introduced in 2005, entrustable professional activities (EPAs) offer a more robust curriculum development and assessment process, especially in regard to clinician-oriented workplace-based assessments. Despite their intuitive match with decisions made in the clinical environment daily by clinicians, the development of specialty-specific EPAs and corresponding culturally situated assessment tools has lagged.MethodsTo address this gap, a 90-minute faculty development workshop was created to introduce faculty to EPAs and their assessment and to provide hands-on practice developing and using EPAs.ResultsPrevious facilitations of this workshop received favorable responses from participants regarding level of detail, understanding of the content, and intent to employ EPAs at their own institutions.DiscussionImplementation of EPAs into the assessment portfolio of medical trainees following this workshop will maximize confidence in determining when a trainee is ready for independent practice.

A Program to Prepare Clinical Pharmacy Faculty Members to Use Entrustable Professional Activities in Experiential Education

“…Sood and colleagues described a 90-minute program that prepared faculty members to embrace the EPA framework as a useful tool in assessing medical trainees. 9 The program incorporated didactic presentation of material and case-based exercises, and covered content applicable to the medical field and generalizable to broader audiences. In developing our program, we used some components of the program developed by Sood and colleagues, but also expanded the application exercises, developed pharmacy-relevant cases, and extended the program to two consecutive sessions with discrete objectives.…”

“…7,8 While these articles contain general recommendations regarding good practices for faculty development for EPAs, only one article provides a specific approach by reporting on a development program's activities, including use of sample student scenarios, and faculty evaluation of the program. 9 To address the lack of descriptive approaches to faculty development for EPAs in the pharmacy literature, this article describes the design and evaluation of a program implemented to ready clinical faculty members to use EPAs for teaching and assessment in experiential education.…”