Entrustable professional activity use in emergency medicine: A scoping review

Objective

The objective was to scope the literature and describe the extent and type of evidence about entrustable professional activities (EPAs) in postgraduate emergency medicine (EM) education.

Methods

Joanna Briggs Institute's methodology was used to find and extract relevant data from documents found in Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE, and CINAHL, supplemented 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 documents were from Canada (51.7%). Twenty-five documents (43.1%) took an explorative approach. Twenty-one documents (36.2%) were translational in approach. Thirteen EPA frameworks, containing a total of 158 EPAs, were found.

Conclusions

EM is an expanding area of EPA development, but frameworks remain highly variable and unstandardized. Most studies are explorative or translational, leaving gaps in experimental research to justify EPA adoption and observational research to assess real-world outcomes.