Entrustable Professional Activities in entry-level health professional education: A scoping review.

Bramley, Andrea Louise; McKenna, Lisa

PURPOSE Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are a recent enhancement to competency-based health professional education that describe the observable work done by a competent health professional. Through defining education outcomes in a work -based context, EPAs offer potential to identify skill gaps in individual or student cohorts and focus improvements. This scoping review aims to map available evidence to provide an overview of EPA use in entry-level healthcare education (Medicine, Nursing and Allied Health) and understand how EPAs are being used and in what contexts. METHOD The Joanna Briggs Institute scoping review methodology was used to explore how and in what context EPAs are being used in entry level health professional education. Databases searched include CINAHL, EMBASE, MEDLINE, Web of Science and PsychInfo. RESULTS A total of 748 abstracts were returned after duplicates removed, 127 full-text articles were screened with 30 included for data extraction. Publications in this area have recently accelerated with disciplines of professions of medicine, pharmacy, dietetics and physician assistants reporting on EPA development, implementation and evaluation. EPA use has been reported in the USA, Canada, Europe Australia and Central America. CONCLUSION Major motivations reported for EPA use is to improve patient safety by aligning performance and expectations and to improve student assessment. Several studies report on the use of EPAs to evaluate different curriculum models or identify curriculum gaps. Entrustable Professional Activities are increasingly well accepted for workplace assessment in multiple entry level health professions and offer strong potential for application to education research.