Innovations to Enhance Residents Training

In contemporary resident training programs Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA’s) are increasingly used for stepwise growth toward independent practice. EPA’s are characteristic activities, defined for a medical specialty, that residents are required to master independently to work as a specialist. Competencies do not become redundant but merely are individual characteristics which are optimally used in aggregated/integrated form (i.e. an EPA) to resemble professional work characteristics. In this perspective EPA’s are the closest representation of clinical practice that enable to monitor trainees’ growth with stepwise reduction of the level of supervision. Backgrounds of the concept, development and application of EPA’s will be presented and the experience in innovative national EPA based paediatric resident training program will be discussed. Simultaneously methods for reliable assessment of progress in clinical practice will be presented.

This presentation aims to enable program directors and residents to understand this innovative concept and to device and implement appropriate EPA’s for their health care settings.

Figure schematically depicts development of EPA’s over time