gms | German Medical Science

Objective: While being originally developed for physicians’ training, the EPA concept has been extended to teacher training and faculty development in health professions education. A comprehensive and overarching sets of teaching EPAs (t-EPAs) has recently been reported for university teachers [1]. In this study we ask the question how well internationally developed t-EPAs fit and adapt to local educational contexts.

Methods: This study aimed to develop t-EPAs for the local undergraduate medical program (Modular Curriculum of Medicine, MCM) at the Charité – Unversitätsmedizin, Berlin. Based on the teaching formats defined in the study regulations; potential t-EPAs were iteratively elaborated. The content elaboration and validation of the t-EPAs involved a Delphi procedure-based interaction between a writing team and a panel of content experts consisting of purposely selected educators and physicians from the Charité faculty (n=11). The breath and scope of each t-EPA were elaborated according to the EPA writing guidelines [2].

Results: The writing team identified 13 t-EPAs from the MCM study regulation, which were confirmed by the panelists with different professional and didactic backgrounds. In two Delphi rounds, the panellists elaborated on the classroom-based and workplace-based teaching EPAs until the overall acceptance for all t-EPAs was more than 80%, indicating that a consensus had been reached. Our classroom-based build on a framework of teaching competence (domains: cognition, motivation and social interaction) and workplace-based teaching formats on clinical EPAs for medical students, respectively. Differing form the set of t-EPAs for university teachers our results include an elaborations and differentiations of small group facilitation formats, e.g. problem-based learning, communication training and emergency simulation. Another feature was the elaboration of t-EPAs for interdisciplinary teaching.

Discussion: Adaptation to the context of an educational program can complement to the reported t-EPAs for university teachers and the resulting t-EPAs provide a more specific elaboration of their teaching tasks.

Take home message: The application of the EPA concept may serve as a new, complementary approach in faculty development to specify and elaborate teaching tasks adapted to the local context.