Entrustable Professional Activities in Medical Education: SELECT Leadership, Values-Based Patient-Centered Care, Health Systems, and Scholarly Excellence

Abstract

Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) represent a concept in medical education that has gained significant traction over the last few years, particularly in the context of competency-based medical education. An EPA refers to a specific task or responsibility that can be entrusted to a trainee once they have demonstrated the necessary competence. EPAs provide concrete tasks that a trainee should be able to complete at various stages of training in order to clarify expectations and responsibilities they should master. The University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine (USFMCOM), Scholarly Excellence, Leadership Experiences, Collaborative Training (SELECT) MD program pairs a unique four-year longitudinal leadership program including the domains of leadership, values-based patient-centered care, health systems, and scholarly excellence with an innovative medical degree program. Students in the SELECT program spend the first two years on the campus in Tampa, Florida, and the clinical years on the regional campus in Allentown, Pennsylvania. These additional threads of curriculum call for a unique set of EPAs. A working group of faculty, students, and administrators within the college from both the main and regional campus developed EPAs for each of the above listed areas of focus within the curriculum. In this paper, the authors describe how Entrustable Professional Activities were developed at MCOM to assess the SELECT curriculum in the areas of leadership, values-based patient-centered care, health systems, and scholarly excellence.