Review 2025

Could entrustable professional activities support assessment in optometric clinical education in Australia and New Zealand?

WK
Watt, Kathleen G.
 JI
Jalbert, Isabelle
 JP
Jhala, Prashant
 RL
Robinson, Linda
Clinical and Experimental Optometry
Journal · Vol. 108 · Issue 3 · pp. 240-247
Abstract

Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) are increasingly being adopted as an assessment tool by medicine and other health professions in a bid to enhance competency-based health professional education. EPAs are well-defined professional activities that can be entrusted to students to perform with varying levels of supervision. They were introduced to overcome some of the limitations of traditional assessment methods of competency such as individual skills assessment or Direct Observation of Procedures and Objective Structured Clinical Examinations. Could EPAs be beneficial in Australian and New Zealand optometric clinical education for advanced skills training and accreditation including the credentialing assessment of overseas educated practitioners? This paper discusses the historical context of how competencies were introduced and assessed in Australian optometry, the evolution of the concept of EPAs in medicine and other health professions, their design and implementation worldwide and whether EPAs could be adopted into optometric training and assessment in Australia and New Zealand. © 2025 Optometry Australia.

Keywords

Author Keywords

entrustable professional activities Clinical assessment competency standards optometry training

Index Keywords

training clinical competence human procedures Humans Vocational education Australia education diagnosis physician health practitioner medical profession review Educational Measurement competency-based education Australia and New Zealand clinical education Accreditation New zealand clinical assessment clinical examination optometry
Author Affiliations
School of Optometry and Vision Science, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
School of Clinical Medicine, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Department of Optometry, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia
Funding & Acknowledgements
No funding information
References 9 References
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