Entrustable Professional Activities for Community Medicine: Integrating Medical Undergraduate Courses and Primary Health Care

Community medicine represents a far-reaching field for the advance of health care, with impact on people’s quality of life and health needs. Health promotion, disease prevention, recovery and rehabilitation have to be incorporated satisfactorily into medical education. The search for a pedagogical tool to fulfill the medical curriculum through actions of community medicine care led us to outline 11 Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) for community medicine. The study was carried out at a public Medical School in Brazil that has a Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC). Fifteen teachers with expertise in community medicine analyzed the resulting EPAs. The EPAs were distributed in three domain areas: care needs of the individual, family and community in Primary Health Care. The teachers answered a total of 13 open questions in a two-round Delphi study. The discourses were submitted to thematic content analysis. Three discourse categories were found about the outlined EPAs: curriculum management and social needs, curriculum management and service integration, and curriculum management and actors. The understanding of the EPAs as a curriculum management tool was relevant, as well as their interface with health care and learning development. The consulted teachers agreed with the designed EPAs and that they are adequate for the first two years of the studied medical course in their Brazilian context. Therefore, it was concluded that the community medicine EPAs are appropriate for the new medical profile, especially in countries with social exclusion, and are a very good tool to promote integrality of care and humanism. This study can facilitate the implementation of a CBC in community medicine and assist in overcoming its challenges through the adoption of the designed EPAs.