Entrustable Professional Activities and Entrustment Decision-Making in Health Professions Education

Book excerpt: This book discusses the ins and outs of a new approach to competency-based education in the education and training of health professionals, including doctors and medical specialists, but also nurses, dentists, pharmacists, veterinarians, physiotherapists and others. Embedded in a conceptual discussion of what competence in health professionals means, the book discusses theoretical foundations of trust and entrustment of trainees with the practice of patient care tasks. It elaborates the implications for identifying the objectives of training, formulated as entrustable professional activities (EPAs), for the associated curriculum development, for assessment of trainees in the clinical workplace, for faculty development and for the management of large scale change in health professions education. In the past decade, EPAs have been proposed, piloted or implemented in all sectors of health professions education and in countries across all continents. Yet, there is a widely felt desire for a better understanding of all related concepts. This text was written with teachers, educational managers, educational scholars, and health profession trainees in mind. The book is the result of a collaboration of fifty highly engaged authors, all actively involved in their own projects and studies around EPAs and workplace-based assessment, as teachers, developers and managers. All chapters have been critically read and commented on by internal and external reviewers, making this work a state of the art document about the topic.