Competencies, milestones and entrustable professional activities - a perfect match

With Adrian Phillip Marty, MD, Pedro Paulo Tanaka, MD, Aileen Marie Adriano, MD, and David Creighton, MD
Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are tasks or responsibilities that faculty entrust to a trainee to execute and those are executable within a given time frame; observable and measurable; and suitable for entrustment decisions. EPA’s are an assessment framework for competency based medical education that shifts the focus from competencies assessed separately, to an integrated appraisal of a trainee’s ability to perform a clinical task with a specified level of supervision.
Descriptions in the literature of the implementation and validation of EPAs in the assessment of medical trainees have been mostly limited to graduate medical education.
Participants in this interactive workshop should be able to: a) define the concept of EPAs and how to construct them; b) describe how to integrate EPAs in the context of Milestones and core competencies in a program of assessment; and c) identify and discuss challenges in implementing EPAs/milestones/competencies in a program of assessment.
Activities have been incorporated to each objective of the workshop, where participants will be able to discuss in pairs, round-tables and debrief with a group of experts on EPA’s (please see WS outline attached). Learners would be expected to apply EPA concept as an assessment immediately after in their program.