Contact:
Brooke Bergen
202-828-0419
bbergen@aamc.org
For Immediate Release
New AAMC Guidelines Released to Prepare Medical Students
for Residency Training and Improve Patient Safety
Washington, D.C., June 10, 2014—A new set of guidelines from the AAMC (Association of
American Medical Colleges) will help bridge the gap between patient care activities that new
physicians should be able to perform on day one of residency training, and those they feel ready to
perform without direct supervision. With the goal of improving patient care and safety, the guidelines
are the first formal outline of the activities and requisite competencies and behaviors that every
graduating medical student should be able to perform upon entering residency.
“As the nation’s medical school graduates prepare to begin their residency training in July, ensuring
they have the confidence to perform these activities is critical for clinical quality and safety,” said
AAMC President and CEO Darrell G. Kirch, M.D. “These guidelines take medical education from the
theoretical to the practical as students think about some of the real-life professional activities they will
be performing as physicians.”
Working with a group of graduate medical education experts, the AAMC developed the Core
Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) for Entering Residency in response to feedback from
residency program directors about the clinical preparedness of entering residents, and from emerging
literature documenting a performance gap at the transition point between medical school and residency
training. The guidelines include 13 activities that all medical students should be able to perform,
regardless of specialty, to standardize the expectations for both learners and teachers and better prepare
students for their roles as clinicians. The core EPAs—which include activities such as gathering a
patient history, prioritizing differential diagnoses, and recommending tests—were chosen as the
framework for the guide because they offer a promising approach for assessing the real-world impact of
a resident physician’s education on patient care.
The guidelines describe expected behaviors and provide clinical vignettes demonstrating how new
residents ready to be entrusted for performance without direct supervision would handle each of the
specific EPAs. This summer, the AAMC will engage a few medical schools to launch a multi-year pilot
and develop a learning community to share ideas about how the EPAs can be broadly implemented.
Click here to download the publication: Core Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) for Entering
Residency.
Additional Resources
The journal Academic Medicine recently published two ahead-of-print online articles that examine the
efforts of one of the few U.S. medical schools to develop and implement EPAs.

An Entrustable Professional Activity (EPA) for Handoffs as a Model for EPA Assessment
Development, by Michael Aylward, M.D., James Nixon, M.D., and Sophia Gladding, Ph.D.,
provides a model for other institutions moving toward an EPA framework.

From Theory to Practice: Making Entrustable Professional Activities Come to Life in the
Context of Milestones, was written by two members of the drafting panel for Core EPAs for
Entering Residency, Robert Englander, M.D., M.P.H. and Carol Carraccio, M.D., M.Ed., and
discusses the importance of more opportunities for EPA assessment and concordance among the
academic medicine community.
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The Association of American Medical Colleges is a not-for-profit association representing all 141
accredited U.S. and 17 accredited Canadian medical schools; nearly 400 major teaching hospitals
and health systems, including 51 Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers; and nearly 90
academic and scientific societies. Through these institutions and organizations, the AAMC
represents 128,000 faculty members, 83,000 medical students, and 110,000 resident physicians.
Additional information about the AAMC and U.S. medical schools and teaching hospitals is
available at www.aamc.org/newsroom.
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