Entrustable Professional Activities

Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are meant to bring a clinical context to the Pediatric Milestones. EPAs are specific observable "tasks" that require knowledge and skills, and ultimately require a multitude of pediatric milestones.

The NASPGHAN EPA Task Force was commissioned to develop specialty specific EPAs in addition to the Common EPAs developed by the ABP.

Common EPAs

The ABP developed 7 EPAs common to all Pediatric Subspecialties which can be found below.

  1. Apply public health principles and improvement methodology to improve care for populations, communities, and systems
  2. Provide for and obtain consultation from other health care providers caring for children
  3. Contribute to the fiscally sound and ethical management of a practice (e.g., through billing, scheduling, coding, and record keeping practices)
  4. Facilitate handovers to another healthcare provider
  5. Lead and work within interprofessional health care teams
  6. Engage in scholarly activities through the discovery, application, and dissemination of new knowledge (broadly defined)
  7. Lead within the subspecialty profession

NASPGHAN EPAs

The NASPGHAN EPA Task Force in partnership with ABP leadership, developed the following 5 EPAs:

  1. Care of children and adolescents with Acute and Chronic Gastrointestinal Disorders
  2. Care of children and adolescents with Acute and Chronic Hepatology, Biliary, and Pancreatic Disorders
  3. Diagnose and manage common outpatient gastro-intestinal disorders in children and adolescents
  4. Perform comprehensive nutritional assessments, provide counseling/education, and manage nutritional support for a variety of conditions
  5. Perform quality upper and lower endoscopic evaluation of the luminal gastrointestinal tract for screening, diagnosis, and intervention

NASPGHAN Detailed EPAs

The NASPGHAN EPA Task Force developed smaller "nested" EPAs within some of the above very large EPAs in order to better define objectives, curriculum, and assessment.

A list of NASPGHAN EPAs with more complete and comprehensive EPAs are listed below. Thus, there are a total of 10 NASPGHAN EPAs used for assessment each with their own assessment table.

Care of children and adolescents with Acute and Chronic Gastrointestinal Disorders

Care of children and adolescents with Acute and Chronic Hepatology, Biliary, and Pancreatic Disorders

Assessment of EPAs

The assessment of EPAs is vital to improving formative feedback to trainees, to improve their ability to independently perform each individual EPA. Therefore, the EPA Task Force created assessment documents, whereby trainees can be rated from level 1 to level 5. Skills, knowledge, or attitudes that a trainee may need to improve can be identified to the trainee, thus improving formative feedback by providing trainees specific areas to improve.

Partners:

The Association of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition Nurses
Help & Hope for Children with Digestive Disorders
Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition
JPGN Reports