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

Immunohistochemistry of the uterine cervix of rats bearing the Walker 256 tumor treated with copaiba balsam

PURPOSE: To investigate the immunohistochemistry of the uterine cervix of 20 Wistar rats (Rattus norvegicus) bearing the Walker 256 tumor, treated with copaiba oil (Copaifera officinalis). METHODS: The animals were grouped into four subgroups, with five rats each: the GCT and GCopT received distilled water and topically copaiba, respectively, while the GCG and GCopG received distilled water and copaiba by gavage, respectively. The substances were administered for nine days. On the 12th day, after euthanasia, the tumor pieces were sent to the identification of T CD4+, T CD8+ and Natural Killer cells. RESULTS: It was found that the pattern of expression for specific markers of phenotypes of cells involved in tumor immune response was similar in all groups, regardless the administration way of copaiba oil (topical or gavage). CONCLUSION: Copaiba balsam, administered either topically or by gavage, did not alter the pattern of tumor immune response in rats bearing Walker 256 Tumor.FAPESPA - Fundação Amazônia de Amparo a Estudos e PesquisasQUARESMA, J. A. S. Universidade Federal do Par