This Guide was written to support educators interested in building a competency-based workplace curriculum. It aims to provide an up-to-date overview of the literature on Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs), supplemented with suggestions for practical application to curriculum construction, assessment and educational technology. The Guide first introduces concepts and definitions related to EPAs and then guidance for their identification, elaboration and validation, while clarifying common misunderstandings about EPAs. A matrix-mapping approach of combining EPAs with competencies is discussed, and related to existing concepts such as competency milestones. A specific section is devoted to entrustment decision-making as an inextricable part of working with EPAs. In using EPAs, assessment in the workplace is translated to entrustment decision-making for designated levels of permitted autonomy, ranging from acting under full supervision to providing supervision to a junior learner. A final section is devoted to the use of technology, including mobile devices and electronic portfolios to support feedback to trainees about their progress and to support entrustment decision-making by programme directors or clinical teams.

Many graduate medical education (GME) programs have started to consider and adopt entrustable professional activities (EPAs) in their competency frameworks. Do EPAs also have a place in undergraduate medical education (UME)? In this Perspective article, the authors discuss arguments in favor of the use of EPAs in UME. A competency framework that aligns UME and GME outcome expectations would allow for better integration across the educational continuum. The EPA approach would be consistent with what is known about progressive skill development. The key principles underlying EPAs, workplace learning and trust, are generalizable and would also be applicable to UME learners. Lastly, EPAs could increase transparency in the workplace regarding student abilities and help ensure safe and quality patient care. The authors also outline what UME EPAs might look like, suggesting core, specialty-specific, and elective EPAs related to core clinical residency entry expectations and learner interest. UME EPAs would be defined as essential health care activities with which one would expect to entrust a resident at the beginning of residency to perform without direct supervision. Finally, the authors recommend a refinement and expansion of the entrustment and supervision scale previously developed for GME to better incorporate the supervision expectations for UME learners. They suggest that EPAs could be operationalized for UME if UME-specific EPAs were developed and the entrustment scale were expanded.

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The concept of entrustable professional activities (EPAs) reframes the approach to assessment in competency-based medical education. Key to this concept is the linking of assessment to decision making about entrusting learners with clinical responsibilities. Based on recent literature and the authors' experiences with implementing EPAs, this article provides practical recommendations for how to implement EPAs for assessment and entrustment decisions in the workplace. Tips for supervising clinicians include talking to learners about trust, using EPA descriptions to guide learning and teaching, providing learners with greater ad hoc responsibilities, using EPAs to identify/create opportunities for assessment and feedback, including case-based discussions and acknowledging gut feelings about learner readiness for more autonomy. Tips for curriculum leaders entail enabling the trust development, applying trust decisions at all levels of the supervision scale, employing all available information sources for entrustment, empowering learner ownership of the assessment process and using technology for learner tracking and program evaluation.