EPAs for Surgical Critical Care

“I think the key elements to successfully implement EPAs in a program are going to be making sure we continue to educate faculty on filling them out by demonstrating how simple and easy it is to use and by demonstrating that it's providing microassessments which then can be aggregated into a global assessment. That's number one. Number two is the global assessment that you'll have of that house staff or fellow at the end of the rotation which will help the Clinical Competency Committee, because you will have hundreds, hopefully, of these assessments.”

"One of the things we've really found helpful in the EPA program implementation is the rapid individualized feedback to both faculty and residents. We got through the initial challenges of getting people to complete the evaluations, and really what we're focused on right now is that group that either doesn't fill them out or doesn't provide the quality of narrative feedback that we're hoping for. This is somewhat effortful, but I think that it takes my time or the program director's time to send emails, make phone calls, and say, ‘Hey, faculty, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate the quality of your formative feedback,’ or, ‘Listen, I see you haven't completed these or these are erring on the side of summative rather than formative feedback.’ This individual troubleshooting has brought us from just clicking the boxes into really accelerating the iterative improvement of our formative narrative feedback.”