Development of the entrustable professional activity ‘medication reconciliation’ for clinical pharmacy

TL;DR

This paper describes the development and validation of a new assessment tool for pharmacy students and trainees focused on medication reconciliation in a German hospital setting.

Contribution

The paper introduces the first clinical pharmacy EPA for medication reconciliation in a German context.

Findings

Medication reconciliation was identified as a suitable EPA candidate for pharmacy assessment.

The developed EPA was validated by 27 clinical pharmacists across Germany.

Quality testing using the EQual rubric showed the EPA to be of good quality.

Abstract

Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) are observable process descriptions of clinical work units. EPAs support learners and tutors in assessment within healthcare settings. For use amongst our pharmacy students as well as pre-registration pharmacists we wanted to develop and validate an EPA for use in a clinical pharmacy setting at LMU University Hospital.

The development of the clinical pharmacy EPA followed a set pathway. A rapid literature review informed the first draft, an interprofessional consensus group consisting of pharmacists, nurses, and medical doctors refined this draft. The refined version was then validated via online survey utilising clinical pharmacists from Germany.

We designed, refined and validated an EPA regarding medication reconciliation for assessment of pharmacy students and trainees within the pharmacy department at LMU University Hospital in Munich. Along with the EPA description an associated checklist to support the entrustment decision was created. For validation an online survey with 27 clinical pharmacists from all over Germany was conducted. Quality testing with the EQual rubric showed a good EPA quality.

We developed the first clinical pharmacy EPA for use in a German context. Medication reconciliation is a suitable EPA candidate as it describes a clinical activity performed by pharmacists in many clinical settings. The newly developed and validated EPA ‘Medication Reconciliation’ will be used to assess pharmacy students and trainees.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-024-05504-0.

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