Entrustable Professional Activities in Postgraduate General Surgery Training: A Scoping Review.

Objective: To provide an overview of the current use of Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) in postgraduate general surgery training internationally.

Background: Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) were introduced to connect clinical competencies and the professional activities to be entrusted to trainees on graduation. The popularity of EPAs as a framework for assessment is growing globally, including in general surgery.

Preparing Medical and Nursing Students for Interprofessional Feedback Dialogues.

Background: In healthcare education, preparing students for interprofessional feedback dialogues is vital. However, guidance regarding developing interprofessional feedback training programs is sparse. In response to this gap, the Westerveld framework, which offers principles for interprofessional feedback dialogue, was developed.

Do summative entrustment decisions actually lead to entrustment?

Background: Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) were introduced across Dutch postgraduate programmes between 2017 and 2019. We aimed to understand the extent to which residents actually were granted increased clinical responsibility upon receiving summative entrustment for an EPA, a critical feature of its use.

Methods: A survey study was conducted among all Dutch residents who started dermatology training in 2018 and 2019 and all Dutch dermatology programme directors (PDs).

Clinical supervision under pressure: a qualitative study amongst health care professionals working on the ICU during COVID-19.

Purpose: The unprecedented influx of patients in 2020 with COVID-19 to intensive care units (ICU) required redeployment of healthcare professionals without adequate previous ICU-training. In these extraordinary circumstances, pivotal elements of effective clinical supervision emerged. This study sets out to explore the nature, aspects and key features of supervision under highly demanding circumstances among certified and redeployed health-care professionals on COVID-19 ICUs.

Twelve tips to develop entrustable professional activities.

Entrustable professional activities (EPAs), units of professional practice that require proficient integration of multiple competencies and can be entrusted to a sufficiently competent learner, are increasingly being used to define and inform curricula of health care professionals. The process of developing EPAs can be challenging and requires a deep yet pragmatic understanding of the concepts underlying EPA construction. Based on recent literature and the authors' lessons learned, this article provides the following practical and more or less sequential recommendations for developing EPAs: [1] Assemble a core team; [2] Build up expertise; [3] Establish a shared understanding of the purpose of EPAs; [4] Draft preliminary EPAs; [5] Elaborate EPAs; [6] Adopt a framework of supervision; [7] Perform a structured quality check; [8] Use a Delphi approach for refinement and/or consensus; [9] Pilot test EPAs; [10] Attune EPAs to their feasibility in assessment; [11] Map EPAs to existing curriculum; [12] Build a revision plan.

Some residents drop out of specialty training. How important is prior clinical experience? A survey among residents in the Netherlands.

Objectives: The drop-out rate among residents across all medical specialties in the Netherlands approximates 12.7%. This implies a capacity loss in the medical workforce, a waste of educational resources and personal damage to individuals.

A grounded theory study on the dynamics of parental grief during the children's end of life.

Aim: Parents are increasingly confronted with loss during their child's end of life. Healthcare professionals struggle with parental responses to loss. This study aimed to understand parental coping with grief during their child's end of life.

Expectations for PhDs in health professions education: an international EPA-framed, modified Delphi study.

Health professions education (HPE) has matured into field of study that employs and produces specialized educational scholars. Many academic institutions employ such scholars to support development and innovation in education. Simultaneously, the possibilities to obtain a PhD degree in HPE are expanding.

The logic behind entrustable professional activity frameworks: A scoping review of the literature.

Introduction: Entrustable professional activities (EPAs), discrete profession-specific tasks requiring integration of multiple competencies, are increasingly used to help define and inform curricula of specialty training programmes. Although guidelines exist to help guide the developmental process, deciding what logic to use to draft a preliminary EPA framework poses a crucial but often difficult first step. The logic of an EPA framework can be defined as the perspective used by its developers to break down the practice of a profession into units of professional work.

Assessing Knowledge of Pharmacokinetics in an Integrated Medical Curriculum.

Pharmacokinetics is the branch of pharmacology that describes how the body processes drugs. As most physicians will prescribe drugs during their career, knowledge of pharmacokinetics is indispensable for medical students. Students, however, experience pharmacokinetics as difficult, probably due to its abstract and mathematical nature.

Challenges in Preloss Care to Parents Facing Their Child's End-of-Life: A Qualitative Study From the Clinicians Perspective.

Objective: Bereavement care for parents predominantly focuses on care after child loss. However, Health Care Professionals (HCPs) feel responsible for supporting parents who are grieving losses in their child's end-of-life. Preloss care is tailored to the parents' needs, thus highly varying.

Emotion in remediation: A scoping review of the medical education literature.

Objectives: Remediation can be crucial and high stakes for medical learners, and experts agree it is often not optimally conducted. Research from other fields indicates that explicit incorporation of emotion improves education because of emotion's documented impacts on learning. Because this could present an important opportunity for improving remediation, we aimed to investigate how the literature on remediation interventions in medical education discusses emotion.

True Entrustment Decisions Regarding Entrustable Professional Activities Happen in the Workplace, not in the Classroom Setting.

Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are workplace responsibilities that directly impact patient care. The use of EPAs allows pharmacy faculty and preceptors to provide learners with feedback and assessment in the clinical setting. Because they focus assessment on a learner's execution of professional activities which requires integration of the respective competencies, EPAs help provide a more holistic picture of a learner's performance.

Health professions education scholarship: The emergence, current status, and future of a discipline in its own right.

Medical education, as a domain of scholarly pursuit, has enjoyed a remarkably rapid development in the past 70 years and is now more commonly known as health professions education (HPE) scholarship. Evidenced by a solid increase of publications, numbers of specialized journals, professional associations, national and international conferences, academies for medical educators, masters and doctoral courses, and the establishment of many units of HPE scholarship, the domain of HPE education scholarship has matured into a scholarly discipline in its own right. In this contribution, the author reviews the developments of the field from Boyer's four criteria that determine scholarship: discovery, integration, application, and teaching.

Entrustable Professional Activities and Entrustment Decision Making: A Development and Research Agenda for the Next Decade.

To establish a research and development agenda for Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) for the coming decade, the authors, all active in this area of investigation, reviewed recent research papers, seeking recommendations for future research. They pooled their knowledge and experience to identify 3 levels of potential research and development: the micro level of learning and teaching; the meso level of institutions, programs, and specialty domains; and the macro level of regional, national, and international dynamics. Within these levels, the authors categorized their recommendations for research and development.

The Implementation of Entrustable Professional Activities in Postgraduate Medical Education in the Netherlands: Rationale, Process, and Current Status.

Postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands has adopted competency-based education since the turn of the century. In 2006, the CanMEDS competency framework was introduced. A 2013 government plan to reduce the length and budgets of training programs led the Dutch Association of Medical Specialists (DAMS) to respond with a proposal to create more flexibility and individualization rather than a blunt cut in the length across all training programs.

Support for using a three-dimensional anatomy application over anatomical atlases in a randomized comparison.

To investigate to what extent the use of a three-dimensional (3D) anatomy computer application can improve the acquisition of anatomical knowledge compared with anatomical atlases, junior and advanced medical students participated in an experiment. Participants were asked to answer anatomical questions with the use of a 3D anatomy application (developed at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands) or anatomy atlases. Every student had to complete two assignments, either with an atlas or with the 3D anatomy application.

Competency-based time-variable training internationally: Ensuring practical next steps in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Competency-based medical education has been advocated as the future of medical education for nearly a half-century. Inherent to this is the promise that advancement and transitions in training would be defined by readiness to practice rather than by time. Of the logistical problems facing competency-based, time-variable (CBTV) training, enacting may be the largest hurdle to clear.

On the validity of summative entrustment decisions.

Health care revolves around trust. Patients are often in a position that gives them no other choice than to trust the people taking care of them. Educational programs thus have the responsibility to develop physicians who can be trusted to deliver safe and effective care, ultimately making a final decision to entrust trainees to graduate to unsupervised practice.

Why clinical training in China should improve: a cross-sectional study of MD graduates.

Background: China is experiencing major medical education reforms that include establishing national training standards, standards for health professionals, and advanced health delivery system requirements. Graduate medical education (GME) is being piloted as a merger of Doctor of Medicine (MD) with PhD programs to improve academic research and clinical training. However, the academic degree-centred system has led to a preoccupation with research rather than clinical training.

Developing Entrustable Professional Activities for the Training of Translational Scientists: A Modified Delphi Study.

Purpose: Improved training for translational scientists is important to help address the waste of resources and irreproducibility of research outcomes in current translational medicine. However, there are a lack of training programs that cover the full range of knowledge and skills translational scientists need to develop, and many translational research training programs struggle to develop competency frameworks and assessment tools. Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) have been successfully implemented to link competencies with everyday practice in training health care professionals but have not yet been developed for research training.

An EPA for better Bedside Teaching.

Background: Bedside teaching (BST), a time-honoured tradition of clinical teaching which integrates theoretical knowledge and clinical practice, has declined steeply over the last decade. Moreover, many clinician teachers today are not specifically trained in and/or comfortable in delivering effective BST. Resucitating this valuable educational format may require a new approach to preparing teachers and setting the stage for effective BST.