Entrustable professional activities in medical education and their importance

Abstract

Trust is a fundamental concept for safe and effective health care. Patients need to trust their doctors and healthcare providers need to trust each other in a healthcare system. Entrustable professional activities are units of professional performance defined as tasks or responsibilities that should be entrusted to the trainee for unsupervised performance once the trainee has achieved sufficient specific competence. Many medical professions can be described by the activities that the specialist must perform. What is important in medical education after completing the course is that these activities are performed confidently. In practice, it is reasonable to expect that most trainees will have the ability to perform all Entrustable professional activities around the time of graduation, but bright students may achieve this ability sooner. Recently, the use of Entrustable professional activities has also begun in general medical education in the United States and Canada. In other fields, other than medicine, such as nursing, veterinary medicine, and midwifery, Entrustable professional activities have been actively developed.