Identifying Community-Based Entrustable Professional Activities for Medical Students Through a Modified Delphi...

Recognition of the need for medical education to train physicians who are skilled at supporting population health and work beyond traditional health care settings is growing. Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) for medical students typically have centered around activities taking place in the clinical workplace; however, EPAs that involve working with community members in community contexts have not been clearly established.

We used a three-stage online modified-Delphi method to identify community-based EPAs for University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health medical students. We recruited key stakeholders to participate and asked them, based on their experience, to generate a list of community-based tasks that they believed graduates should be trusted to perform. Subsequently, using a five-point anchored Likert scale (1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree), we asked participants to rate their level of agreement with each identified task becoming an EPA. An a priori definition of consensus was established.

Twenty-two tasks reached consensus as potential community-based EPAs. The tasks with the highest mean ratings were "addressing trust issues with the medical community amongst the local population" (mean=4.71), "meeting with community members around a health topic" (mean=4.64), "identifying opportunities for disease prevention" (mean=4.64), and "identifying policies that impact community outcomes" (mean=4.57).

The identified community-based tasks can support the augmentation of existing community-based curriculum and help identify areas for novel curriculum and assessment development. Lessons learned from this local effort could be helpful to other programs seeking to establish and refine community-based curricula.