Abstract
Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) have emerged as a useful and feasible way to put outcome-based competency frameworks into practice. It has given curriculum planners a tool to signpost the expected outcomes of a trainee as well as for the trainers to effectively evaluate if the student/resident is attaining the relevant competencies at the right time. Work on EPAs is well underway in graduate medical education and some allied health professions. However, currently, there is a paucity of published work in this area in undergraduate medical education. We describe a transferrable approach to feasibly document EPAs in an undergraduate medical education curriculum in Singapore and discuss limitations and challenges faced when developing EPAs in this setting.
Highlights
Health professional training institutions across the globe have been involved in transforming both undergraduate and postgraduate programs from process-oriented training to competencyoriented training built on outcome-focused curricula
All entrustable professional activities (EPAs) relevant to a particular professional program when assembled together demonstrates the competencies necessary for that profession. Such EPA based descriptions of training and curricula, to date, involve mainly postgraduate and allied health settings (Jones et al, 2011; Mulder et al, 2010) The schemes described in the literature do not address the „ground state‟ expected of an entering medical trainee
Extending the current use of EPAs „backwards‟ from the graduate medical education (GME) realm to include the undergraduate medical education sphere is essential in ensuring that the „product‟ of medical school is aligned with the subsequent expectations of baseline knowledge skills and attitudes required by the graduate medical education of the entry level trainee
Summary
Health professional training institutions across the globe have been involved in transforming both undergraduate and postgraduate programs from process-oriented training to competencyoriented training built on outcome-focused curricula. The use of entrustable professional activities (EPAs) has emerged as a leading strategy, especially in postgraduate medical education, to ensure that trainees do show the relevant and necessary set of skills during the course and at the completion of their training (Bowen, 2006; Ten Cate, 2005). Such EPA based descriptions of training and curricula, to date, involve mainly postgraduate and allied health settings (Jones et al, 2011; Mulder et al, 2010) The schemes described in the literature do not address the „ground state‟ expected of an entering medical trainee.
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