The AAPS 103rd Annual Meeting 2025

•The American Board of Surgery has implemented Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) in general and vascular surgery as a mode of assessing competency-based education

•Entrustable Professional Activity (EPA): Unit of professional practice that can be entrusted to a trainee, once they have demonstrated the necessary competence to execute this activity unsupervised

•Plastic surgery currently does not have an EPA curriculum

1. Design and implement an EPA assessment tool

2. Describe our experience implementing EPA assessments at a major plastic surgery residency program

•Followed American Board of Surgery EPA format and ACGME guidelines

•Used the Smartsheet platform to create our EPA assessment tool

•Created 4-5 broad questions per phase of care (limited participation, direct supervision, indirect supervision, practice ready)

•Entrustment level descriptions kept broad intentionally to cover many plastic surgery procedures

•Created a badge with a QR code linked to the EPA platform to increase accessibility for faculty

•Implemented EPA assessment tool in July 2024

• Adopted in July 2024 in a single integrated plastic surgery residency

• 2 EPAs/week/resident, self-evaluations encouraged

• Data from July 2024 – April 2025

•We developed a generic EPA that can be applicable to all areas of plastic surgery

•Learned how it can encourage more real-time feedback compared to a single end of rotation evaluation

•Increased opportunities for feedback and communication

•Self-evaluations provided residents to self-identify areas of improvement

•Identified possible need for sub-EPAs

•Risk of evaluator bias and pattern recognition

•Potential role in less commonly performed procedures not in the core EPAs

The AAPS 103rd Annual Meeting 2025

Implementing Entrustable Professional Activities In Plastic Surgery Residency Training

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