Understanding Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs)
Understanding Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs)
EPAs are the backbone of this learning platform.
They represent the real clinical tasks that define the daily practice of an anaesthesiologist : observable, measurable activities that residents must be able to perform safely and independently.
Following the framework described by Olle ten Cate, EPAs integrate knowledge, technical skills, and professional judgement into authentic clinical performance.
They make competence tangible, not just what you know, but what you can do when trusted with patient care.
Our program organises EPAs into three main categories:
Core General EPAs – transversal activities essential to all anaesthesiology practice.
Core Specific EPAs – activities strongly linked to particular surgical specialties.
Procedural EPAs – the fundamental technical procedures every anaesthesiologist must master by the end of residency.
At our institution, the first year of training focuses on a foundational subset called Essential EPAs.
These represent the activities first-year residents must be able to perform autonomously on simple patients undergoing simple procedures, before progressing to advanced specialty training. Completing this Essential EPA program is also a requirement for trainees completing a single year of anaesthesiology training in the context of another specialty, such as emergency medicine or intensive care.
Essential EPAs (Year 1 Program) :
Core general :
- Perform a pre-anaesthesia evaluation
- Obtain an informed consent
- Set-up the anaesthesia workstation
- Perform an induction for GA
- Sustain an anaesthesia during an intervention
- Manage an emergence from anaesthesia
- Perform a patient hand-over
- Perform basic postoperative care
- Perform a bag-mask ventilation
- Perform an oral intubation
- Insert a supraglottic airway device
- Perform an epidural anaesthesia