The viability of interprofessional entrustable professional activities

Interprofessional education (IPE) and entrustable professional activities (EPAs) represent two topics in health professions education that have attracted significant attention in recent years. IPE (when different health professionals learn with, from and about each other with the aim of optimal care) has an inherent focus on the collective. EPAs (units of professional practice that can be fully entrusted to a trainee, once he or she has demonstrated the necessary competence to execute this activity unsupervised) have a focus on the individual. Attempts to relate the two may cause friction and the question is: can they be reconciled? Are interprofessional EPAs or team-EPAs useful concepts and if so what should they look like? The authors argue that most work in modern healthcare involves interprofessional collaboration. Some EPAs have an inherent strong interprofessional nature, such as emergency teamwork, running multidisciplinary team meetings, and surgery. Other EPAs are less inherently dependent on interprofessional collaboration. The authors conclude that neither interprofessional team-EPAs (for which a team can or should be certified), nor IP-EPAs for individuals, as opposed to other EPAs, are viable concepts. However, the authors do not question that certifying health care professionals and entrusting trainees with most clinical tasks will require to ascertain their competence in interprofessional collaboration. This must be included when assessing learners for most EPAs and making entrustment decisions. This can help to strengthen interprofessional competence in the clinical workplace.