National consensus on entrustable professional activities for competency-based training in anaesthesiology

Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA) are specialty specific tasks or responsibilities, combining the clinical workplace and the long-demanded competency-based medical education. The first step to transform time-based into EPA-based training is to reach consensus on core EPAs that describe sufficiently the workplace. We aimed to present a nationally validated EPA-based curriculum for postgraduate training in anaesthesiology. Using a predefined and validated list of EPAs, we applied a Delphi consensus approach, involving all German chair directors of anaesthesiology. We then conducted a subsequent qualitative analysis. Thirty-four chair directors participated in the Delphi survey (77% response) and twenty-five completed all the questions (56% overall response). Reflected by the intra-class-correlation, the consensus on the importance (ICC: 0.781, 95% CI 0.671, 0.868) and the year of entrustment (ICC: 0.973, 95% CI 0.959, 0.984) of each EPA reached high levels of agreement among the chair directors. The comparison of data assessed in the preceding validation and present study showed excellent and good levels of agreement (ICC entrustment: 0.955, 95% CI 0.902, 0.978; ICC importance: 0.671, 95% CI -0.204, 0.888). The adaptation process, based on the qualitative analysis, resulted in a final set of 34 EPAs. We present an elaborate, fully described and nationally validated EPA-based curriculum, reflecting a broad consensus among different stakeholders of anaesthesiology. We hereby provide a further step towards competency-based postgraduate anaesthesiology training.