Time to Trust: Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships and Entrustable Professional Activities

Medical education shaped by the learning sciences can better serve medical students, residents, faculty, health care institutions, and patients. With increasing innovation in undergraduate and graduate medical education and more focused attention on educational principles and how people learn, this era of educational transformation offers promise. Principles manifest in educational continuity are informing changes in educational structures and venues and are enriching new discourse in educational pedagogy, assessment, and scholarship. The articles by Myhre and colleagues and Woloschuk and colleagues in this issue, along with mounting evidence preceding these works, should reassure that principle-driven innovation in medical education is not only possible but can be achieved safely. In this commentary, the authors draw from these works and the wider literature on longitudinal integrated educational design. They suggest that the confluences of movements for longitudinal integrated clerkships and entrustable professional activities open new possibilities for other educational and practice advancements in quality and safety. With the advent of competency-based education, explicit milestones, and improved assessment regimens, overseers will increasingly evaluate students, trainees, and other learners on their ability rather than relying solely on time spent in an activity. The authors suggest that, for such oversight to have the most value, assessors and learners need adequate oversight time, and redesign of educational models will serve this operational imperative. As education leaders are reassessing old medical school and training models, rotational blocks, and other barriers to progress, the authors explore the dynamic interplay between longitudinal integrated learning models and entrustment.