Entrustable professional activities and EPA frameworks defined

Abstract

Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) serve important purposes in health professions education. These purposes include supporting curriculum development and delivery and guiding trainee assessment, as well as grounding high-stakes decisions to allow trainees to practice in unsupervised settings. These purposes require more than a succinct and recognizable title of an EPA. For their full potential, descriptions of EPAs must be fully elaborated with the detailed information required to deliver on each of these purposes. Elaborating EPAs also requires a clear understanding of the relationships between other educational and professional constructs such as knowledge and competencies. This chapter discusses the distinction and relationship between knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs), competencies, and EPAs, discusses the components of a fully elaborated EPA and why these components are important to implementing EPAs in educational programs, and examines how EPAs are assembled into frameworks of EPAs to serve a profession or discipline. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of transdisciplinary EPAs.