[Entrustable professional activities : Promising concept in postgraduate medical education]

Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) are characterized as self-contained units of work in a given typical clinical context, which may be entrusted to a trainee for independent execution at a certain point of training. An example could be the intraoperative anesthesia management of an ASA 1 patient for an uncomplicated surgical intervention as an EPA in early postgraduate anesthesia training. The EPAs can be described as an evolution of a competency-based medical educational concept, applying the concept of the competencies of a person to specific workplace contexts. In this way the expected level of skills and supervision at a certain stage of training have a more practical meaning and the danger of fragmentation of individual competencies in the competence-based model is avoided. It is a more holistic view of a trainee. Experience with this new concept is so far limited, therefore, further studies are urgently needed to determine whether and how EPAs can contribute to improvements in further training.