Implementing Entrustable Professional Activities in a pre-licensure nursing program to facilitate competency-based education

Abstract

Background

Competency-based education (CBE) is a promising strategy to best prepare pre-licensure students for practice readiness. Challenges with implementing CBE include creating progressive learner experiences across the curriculum with clearly delineated learner expectations and developing evaluations to provide evidence of competency attainment.

Innovation

Implementing Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) with progressive levels of mastery, throughout a pre-licensure nursing program provides a method for incorporating CBE. Nursing faculty planned, implemented, and evaluated EPAs in a pre-licensure nursing program.

Implications

Employing EPAs is an important supplement to classroom theory allowing students to practice making clinical decisions in a safe environment. The development of EPAs with progressive levels of mastery can be integrated and evaluated throughout nursing curricula.

Conclusions

EPAs allowed faculty to evaluate students' application of knowledge in simulated situations and to gather evidence to substantiate competency proficiency. Various EPAs can be developed, implemented, and evaluated progressively across nursing curricula to promote practice ready nursing graduates.