Milestones and entrustable professional activities: The key to practically translating competencies for interprofessional education?

Abstract

Competency-based education and practice have become foundational for developing interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional collaboration. There has been a plethora of competencies developed in these areas recently, both at individual institutions and nationally; however, their effective integration and thus potential has not been fully realized educationally. Milestones and entrustable professional activities (EPAs) are new concepts and assessment approaches from medical education that provide a way to functionally use and maximize competencies to ensure that competency is attained. They are applicable to learning activities both within the classroom and the clinic, as well as to lifelong learning. This paper defines and describes milestones and EPAs, considers the importance of their application to IPE, and summarizes a future research project that will identify EPAs for an IPE curriculum.

• Assessment
• competencies
• competency-based education
• Delphi approach
• entrustable professional activities
• interprofessional education
• milestones

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of our good colleague Brian Simmons for his critical help in shaping some of the ideas for this project.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the writing and content of this article.