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Development of Entrustable Professional Activities for Adult Intensive Care
Thais Oliveira Gomes1, Fernanda Berchelli Girão2, Erika Azevedo Portes3
1Faculty of Medicine, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Background:
In Brazil, intensive care nurses are primarily trained through lato sensu postgraduate programmes, which are mostly theoretical and vary widely in duration, workload, modality and area of subspecialization. These factors raise concerns about the quality of education and development of crucial professional competencies. Although competencies required for intensive care nurses have been defined, they are often broad, extensive and difficult to integrate into training programmes. Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) were introduced to implement competency-based education in clinical practice and facilitate trainees' assessment.
Aim:
Identify, develop and validate the content of a set of EPAs for adult intensive care in Brazil.
Study Design:
This methodological study was conducted in five interdependent steps, involving intensive care nurses, educators and researchers. The nominal group and modified Delphi consensus techniques were used to identify, review and validate eligible EPAs as well as analyse the quality of pre-designed EPAs.
Results:
The nominal group initially proposed 14 EPAs, which were reduced to 13 after quality control. The modified Delphi process included two rounds, with 26 and 11 responses, respectively. After the second round of the Delphi technique, consensus was reached regarding the 13 EPAs; the content validation index for indispensability and clarity was > 0.8.
Conclusions:
In this study, 13 EPAs for adult intensive care nurses in Brazil were identified, developed and validated using consensus methods. The EPAs cover management, soft skills, teaching and direct patient care and offer a comprehensive overview of essential nursing activities in intensive care. The development of these EPAs can help clarify the role of intensive care nurses, support the design of competency-based curricula for intensive care nursing residency programmes and guide evaluations based on key professional activities.
Relevance To Clinical Practice:
This study serves as a reference for research about the development of EPAs for nursing, other intensive care specialties and may encourage further clinical validation studies.
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