Pediatric Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) in Professional Physical Therapist Education

APTA Pediatrics has been a long-standing leader in PT education in advancing competency-based education (CBE). APTA Pediatrics has hosted three Education Summits to advance pediatric education through research to identify best practices. Summit I developed the Pediatric Essential Core Competencies (ECCs) to inform pediatric content in entry-level curriculum. Summit II established collaborative teams to conduct educational research projects. Recently, Summit III facilitated the revision of the Pediatric ECCs and established research teams based upon the pediatrics educational research priorities.4 The purpose of this session is to present the results from one Summit III research team on the development and proposed implementation of the Pediatric Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) into professional PT education.

The PT education community has identified CBE as a component to achieving the vision to advance excellence in education. The profession has identified a critical need to establish performance-based learning grounded in competence to create adaptive learners. Work groups tasked by the Educational Leadership Partnership have begun to develop a broad CBE framework. APTA Pediatrics has revised the Pediatric ECCs to specify the pediatric knowledge, skills, and abilities integral to include within professional PT programs as a component of the broad framework. The Pediatrics EPAs are a critical component of CBE as they are the essential professional tasks executed by a PT related to clinical care of a pediatric patient/client. The EPAs further operationalize competencies by linking them to professional tasks to assist CIs in evaluating not only learners’ competence but also their autonomy in carrying out EPAs.