Developing End-of-Training Entrustable Professional Activities for Psychiatry: Results and Methodological Lessons.

Purpose: To develop entrustable professional activities (EPAs) for psychiatry and to demonstrate an innovative, validity-enhancing methodology that may be relevant to other specialties.

Method: A national task force employed a three-stage process from May 2014 to February 2017 to develop EPAs for psychiatry. In stage 1, the task force used an iterative consensus-driven process to construct proposed EPAs.

Covert medication in psychiatric emergencies: is it ever ethically permissible?

Covert administration of medications to patients, defined as the administration of medication to patients without their knowledge, is a practice surrounded by clinical, legal, ethics-related, and cultural controversy. Many psychiatrists would be likely to advocate that the practice of covert medication in emergency psychiatry is not clinically, ethically, or legally acceptable. This article explores whether there may be exceptions to this stance that would be ethical.

An approach to evaluating competence in assessing and managing violence risk.

Objective: The authors developed and evaluated a tool for assessing competency in violence risk assessment and management.

Methods: The Competency Assessment Instrument for Violence Risk (CAI-V) was based on the literature on violence risk assessment, which was complemented by feedback from faculty focus groups. In an objective structured clinical examination, 31 faculty observers used the CAI-V to rate the performance of 31 learners' (26 psychiatry residents and five psychology interns) risk assessments of standardized (simulated) patients.