gms | German Medical Science

5th International Conference for Research in Medical Education

15.03. - 17.03.2017, Düsseldorf

Developing EPAs for an Undergraduate Course: A Three-Step Approach

Meeting Abstract

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  • corresponding author presenting/speaker Janna-Lina Kerth - RWTH Aachen University Medical Faculty, Medical Didactics and Curriculum Development, Aachen, Germany
  • Melanie Simon - RWTH Aachen University Medical Faculty, Medical Didactics and Curriculum Development, Aachen, Germany

5th International Conference for Research in Medical Education (RIME 2017). Düsseldorf, 15.-17.03.2017. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2017. DocP2

doi: 10.3205/17rime33, urn:nbn:de:0183-17rime338

Published: March 7, 2017

© 2017 Kerth et al.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. See license information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


Outline

Text

Introduction: In the Aachen model curriculum, the last course before the Practical Year (semesters 11 and 12) is the so called Clinical Competence Course. After the course, students should be able to name and evaluate differential diagnoses for common symptoms and use clinical reasoning skills. Currently, lectures are used predominantly in the course and the exam consists solely of MC questions.

The course is being restructured to include more practical and clinical reasoning skills both in teaching and testing. To this end, Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) will be implemented.

Objectives: As the EPAs will represent what clinicians expect students to know and be able to do in their Practical Year, clinicians must be included in formulating them. Students and stake-holders within the Medical Faculty should also be involved in order to ensure wide acceptance of the concept.

Materials & Methods: We identified our regular medical didactics courses which are aimed specifically at clinicians as a suitable platform for the development of such EPAs. During the course, participants learn about EPAs and then apply this new knowledge by formulating them in small groups. Due to the nature of our courses, these groups are usually multidisciplinary and include individuals already highly involved in teaching as well as relative novices.

In a second step, student representatives were invited to review the EPAs. In a third step, stake-holders such as departmental chairs will be invited in order to reach a broad consensus on the EPAs to be implemented.

Results: We found the multidisciplinary, diverse-background approach to work well. Consensus on a useful skill set which students should possess was reached reasonably fast in the small working groups and EPAs were not overly specific.

The students that were asked to review and discuss the EPAs generally agreed that they were useful and, most importantly, achievable before entering the Practical Year.

Conclusion: Nesting the development of EPAs in a course on clinical teaching is a feasible, resource-effective approach. We were able to include those clinicians that might not participate in such a task otherwise. Forming multidisciplinary groups to work on such tasks is often difficult due to conflicting schedules in clinical work; this was also fostered by embedding it in a course.