Trainers’ and trainees’ expectations of entrustable professional activities (EPAs) in a primary care training programme

ABSTRACT

Introducing Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) into primary care postgraduate medical education (PGME) programmes may be challenging, due to the general nature of primary care medicine, but trainers and trainees both stand to benefit from their use. We investigated the expectations of trainers and trainees in a primary care PGME programme regarding the use of EPAs. We held two focus group discussions with trainers and four with trainees from the Dutch General Practice training programme, to explore their views on the use of EPAs in their training programme. Focus group discussions were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were analysed using conventional content analysis. Trainers and trainees felt that the large number of EPAs in the training programme, and the general way they are formulated, made them unsuitable for use in formal assessments. However, they felt that EPAs can be a useful aid to trainee learning. EPAs may help trainers to give trainees specific feedback on their performance. While the use of the classic EPA method in primary care PGME programmes may be challenging, EPAs in such programmes might be more suitable as design and learning tools than as a tool for formal assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• medical [MeSH]
• entrustable professional activities (EPAs)
• primary health care [MeSH]
• qualitative research [MeSH]

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the participating trainers and trainees for their willingness to contribute to the study. We would like to especially thank Suzanne van Rhijn for her support during the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

This study was approved by the Ethical Review Board of the ‘Netherlands Association for Medical Education’ (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Medisch Onderwijs (NVMO, file number 725)).

Additional information

Funding

This publication was written as a part of the project ‘The use of Entrustable Professional Activities in Assessment in General Practice Specialty Training’ (project number 839130004), that received funding from the ‘Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development’ (ZonMW).