Exploring the Irish general practice training community’s perceptions on how an entrustable professional activities dashboard implementation could facilitate general practice training in Ireland

ABSTRACT

Background

The Irish General Practitioner Training (GP) Programme is currently moving to Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME), facilitated by Programmatic Assessment (PA) and Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs). These new assessment and feedback mechanisms may provide a rich and much sought-after dataset. However, given the possible number of feedback and assessment events, and the variety of modalities used, aggregating and interpreting these can be costly and difficult. Dashboard implementations (DI) have been purposed as a solution to bridge the gap between the large datasets and the training community at all levels.

Aims

To explore the Irish GP training community’s perceptions on how an EPAs DI could facilitate the delivery of GP training in Ireland.

Methods

A qualitative approach was taken, using a focus group representative of different groups in the training community. Concurrently, an EPAs DI was developed. Focus group transcripts were analysed in an iterative fashion using Template Analysis to generate themes and subthemes.

Results

Numerous advantages were seen in relation to the implementation of an EPAs DI around entrustment decisions, constructive alignment and summative decision-making. These advantages, however, need to be tempered with the realisation that the EPAs DI is not and should not be misinterpreted as being the learning analytic panacea for GP training.

Conclusion

This paper outlines the perceptions from a postgraduate medical education training community on an EPAs DI, which would be applicable to other training communities considering introducing similar mechanisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Programmatic assessment
• entrustable professional activities
• work-based assessment
• postgraduate education
• primary care
• competency based medical education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14739879.2023.2191340

Additional information

Funding

A grant under the title “Towards Programmatic Assessment – Designing the dashboard” was received from the National Doctors Training and Planning Department, HSE, Dublin, Ireland