USING ENTRUSTABLE PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES IN THE DESIGN OF THREE NEW HEALTHCARE UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS: BIOMEDICINE, NURSING AND PSYCHOLOGY

Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) can be defined as a unit of professional practice that can be entrusted to a trainee after they have obtained adequate competency. EPAs integrate multiple competencies from several domains and are very useful in designing competency-based curricula. Using EPAs to design medical curricula has been widely described, but their application to curriculum design of other health-related undergraduate programs is scarce. This manuscript critically assesses an educational planning experience of using EPAs to simultaneously design three healthcare undergraduate programs (nursing, biomedicine and psychology) at Faculdade Santa Casa BH, Minas Gerais, Brazil. We present the EPAs for each program, curricula frameworks, educational strategies, and assessment methods. Expert groups of professors and educational specialists defined the core professional activities that would be directly assessed and entrusted to trainees from the three different programs. The expert group then defined the required knowledge, skills, and attitudes for each EPA and selected the appropriate assessment tools to be used in entrustment decisions. The expected entrustment level for each training phase guided the course’s distribution of core and elective courses. The experience of designing a curriculum using EPAs was successful and helped focus on the core activities of each profession. It also provided an opportunity to reflect upon formative and summative assessments throughout the course bringing the challenge of reorienting our teaching practices and assessment approaches. Designing undergraduate curricula of health-related professions using EPAs is feasible and might help operationalize competency-based curricula.  Article visualizations