Entrustable professional activity use in emergency medicine: A scoping review

Abstract

Objective: The objective was to scope the literature and describe the extent and typeof evidence about entrustable professional activities (EPAs) in postgraduate emer-gency medicine (EM) education.Methods: Joanna Briggs Institute's methodology was used to find and extract rel-evant data from documents found in Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE, and CINAHL, sup-plemented by a gray literature search using Google Advanced for EPA frameworks.Eligible documents discussed EPAs for doctors in structured EM training programs.Data extracted included research methods, research approach, participants, scope,EPA element addressed, and dominant logic used by EPA creators.Results: Data were extracted from 58 documents. Thirty-four of the documents(58.6%) were peer-reviewed journal articles, 18 (31.1%) were conference abstracts,and six (10.4%) were curriculum documents from EM organizations. Thirty documentswere from Canada (51.7%). Twenty-five documents (43.1%) took an explorative ap-proach. Twenty-one documents (36.2%) were translational in approach. Thirteen EPAframeworks, containing a total of 158 EPAs, were found.Conclusions: EM is an expanding area of EPA development, but frameworks remainhighly variable and unstandardized. Most studies are explorative or translational, leav-ing gaps in experimental research to justify EPA adoption and observational researchto assess real-world outcomes.K E Y W O R D Scompetency-based education education, graduate emergency service, hospital, medical