True Entrustment Decisions Regarding Entrustable Professional Activities Happen in the Workplace, not in the Classroom Setting

Abstract

Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are workplace responsibilities that directly impact patient care. The use of EPAs allows pharmacy faculty and preceptors to provide learners with feedback and assessment in the clinical setting. Because they focus assessment on a learner’s execution of professional activities which requires integration of the respective competencies, EPAs help provide a more holistic picture of a learner’s performance. Using EPAs to backwards design classroom learning for those competencies is highly encouraged, but instructors cannot or should not assess performance and make entrustment decisions using EPAs in the classroom setting for several reasons: a learner’s classroom performance usually does not predict clinical performance very well, assessment of EPAs require direct observation of the learner performing the EPAs, EPA assessment requires multiple observations of the learner with different patients with varying level of acuity, and most importantly, EPA assessment must result in a decision to trust the learner to perform the clinical activity with limited supervision. By ensuring all entrustment decisions are made in a clinical or experiential setting, students will receive an accurate assessment and benchmark of their performance that will lead them one step closer to becoming independent practitioners.