Competency is at the forefront of everyone’s mind in healthcare. There is barely a hospital, school of nursing, or school of medicine that is not concerned with whether their practitioners and/or soon-to-be graduates are suitably competent to deliver safe patient care. But is competency enough to assess a practitioner’s or a learner’s true readiness to fulfill their appointed role? The answer lies in first answering two questions. How much would you trust a learner to perform their role on their own? And, why? 

In this Part 1 of a two-part series, Hear Olle Ten Cate, Ph.D., share his expertise in assessing Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) and how by focusing on EPAs one can make the process of assessing competency much more powerful.  Known throughout the medical education community, Dr. Cate is Director of the Center for Research & Development of Education at the University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands. In this podcast he explains how competency and EPAs have become critically merged. Competency is about meeting standardized levels of proficiency. EPAs are about assessing if a learner can be trusted to care for a human life without supervision. Listen to how Dr. Cate makes differentiating between competency and EPAs simple.