The Entrustable Professional Activities as part of Competency Assessment in Clinical Practice: an integrative literature review

Abstract

In 2005, Ten Cate advocates that competencies can be operationalized and evaluated by linking them to professional activities and introducing the concept of Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs), defined as work units that allow a clinical supervisor to confirm that the student is ready to take responsibility for such activities. In order to understand the construction and application of APEs in a context of competency assessment and to launch new perspectives of their application, the question was raised: what is the scientific evidence on the assessment of competencies in clinical practice based on reliable professional activities (EPAs)? We conducted an integrative literature review, produced since 2005 in the databases - B-on, PubMed, Scopus, EBSCO and Web of Science, using as inclusion criteria: articles in Portuguese, Spanish or English; open-source full texts; articles that include the English expression “Entrustable professional activities”. From the search 145 articles were obtained, removing the duplicates. Applying the inclusion/ exclusion criteria the list was reduced to 123 articles. After the analysis of the full text, 30 references were extracted whose content was analyzed and categorized, and which point to the benefit of using the EPAs for curricular construction and adaptation to the assessment of competences. concluding that Olle Ten Cate’s EPA concept is replicable for different medical specialties and potentially replicable in other health professions. It is concluded that Olle Ten Cate’s concept of EPA is replicable for different medical specialties and potentially replicable in other health professions.