ArticleAdvances in health sciences education : theory and practice2024
How well do UK assistantships equip medical students for graduate practice? Think EPAs.
Article in Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Entrustable professional activities in medical education: strategies and results - a systematic review.Medical education online · 2026Pooled it
- Medical students as assistants to physicians and hospital volunteers in Poland: a nationwide mapping study of emerging clinical roles.BMC health services research · 2026Article
- Personal Perspective on "The Leap: From Medical Student to First-Year Resident".Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry · 2026Article
- Implementation and Impact of Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) in Health Professions Education: A Global Bibliometric Analysis.Advances in medical education and practice · 2026Article
- Article
- Developing entrustable professional activities for undergraduate operative dentistry clerkship.BMC medical education · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The goal of better medical student preparation for clinical practice drives curricular initiatives worldwide. Learning theory underpins Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) as a means of safe transition to independent practice. Regulators mandate senior assistantships to improve practice readiness. It is important to know whether meaningful EPAs occur in assistantships, and with what impact. Final year students at one UK medical school kept learning logs and audio-diaries for six one-week periods during a year-long assistantship. Further data were also obtained through interviewing participants when students and after three months as junior doctors. This was combined with data from new doctors from 17 other UK schools. Realist methods explored what worked for whom and why. 32 medical students and 70 junior doctors participated. All assistantship students reported engaging with EPAs but gaps in the types of EPAs undertaken exist, with level of entrustment and frequency of access depending on the context. Engagement is enhanced by integration into the team and shared understanding of what constitutes legitimate activities. Improving the shared understanding between student and supervisor of what constitutes important assistantship activity may result in an increase in the amount and/or quality of EPAs achieved.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.