Entrustable Professional Activities: A Faculty Development Workshop for Adding EPAs Into Your Medical Trainee's Assessment Portfolio

INTRODUCTION: The last 3 decades have seen significant changes in medical education and corresponding assessment of medical trainees. Competency-based medical education provided a more comprehensive model than the previous time-based process but remained insufficient. Introduced in 2005, entrustable professional activities (EPAs) offer a more robust curriculum development and assessment process, especially in regard to clinician-oriented workplace-based assessments. Despite their intuitive match with decisions made in the clinical environment daily by clinicians, the development of specialty-specific EPAs and corresponding culturally situated assessment tools has lagged. METHODS: To address this gap, a 90-minute faculty development workshop was created to introduce faculty to EPAs and their assessment and to provide hands-on practice developing and using EPAs. RESULTS: Previous facilitations of this workshop received favorable responses from participants regarding level of detail, understanding of the content, and intent to employ EPAs at their own institutions. DISCUSSION: Implementation of EPAs into the assessment portfolio of medical trainees following this workshop will maximize confidence in determining when a trainee is ready for independent practice.