Dentistry Radboudumc: portfolio with EPA-forms
”My name is Erik Vergoossen and I am a dental professor. I have been involved in the development of the master clinic, the system we use in our master phase for clinical and theoretical education. I am the coordinator of that and in that role I was also involved in introducing the Scorion portfolio and the EPA forms. We are currently working on the further implementation of Scorion and how we want to apply that in the future, that is not quite clear yet. But there is also another development going on, one learns by doing. Besides working at the university, I’m also working in practice two days a week, so I have two jobs. I studied in Nijmegen from 80 to 86 and then worked in Koblenz for more than 20 years. When I returned to the Netherlands, I applied to the Department of Dentistry at the Radboudumc, and I have been working here since 2008.”
Since when have you been involved with Scorion?
I have been involved with Scorion since it was integrated into the design of the master clinic. Although someone else was the contact person then and arranged everything, I was in the project group that worked on integrating Scorion. So I didn’t choose Scorion, it was already there. About 5 years ago we started using Scorion.
Do you remember the reason for contacting us at the time?
Not quite, but I do know that we wanted to give feedback to our students in a better way. We had developed some forms for that ourselves, but that didn’t mature beyond a kind of pilot. We wanted to take a more structured approach. Why it became Scorion I cannot answer.
Were you still working on paper before Scorion?
In addition to our digital patient journal, we were working with feedback forms. That had very limited capabilities and did not work well.
How is Scorion applied within your education?
We use Scorion as a portfolio system and we use the EPA system. Each student completes an EPA form at the end of the practicum, as developed for 14 activities. With this foirm the student reflects on the treatment of the patient of that day, afternoon or morning. That is the basis for the conversation at the end of the practicum with the instructor, the instructor checks if the form is complete and if there is anything to add. There is reflection on dental aspects and on professional development. The student has the opportunity to self-assess and the teacher gives feedback on this and corrects the assessment if deemed necessary. This assessment has no direct relationship to the student’s final grade. The final grade is determined using the CanMeds model and feedback from the EPA forms is just a part of this.
How do you experience Scorion?
I think mainly positive, we do see that working with EPA forms takes a lot of time. And despite the fact that we have 15 minutes for that at the end of the practicum, it doesn’t always work out for the instructor. Starting Scorion is faster now because not all EPA forms are loaded . But loading all the EPA data on the dashboards can sometimes take a while. Other than that, I think the system with giving feedback to the students and reflection by the students with Scorion is good. What I still find quite complicated is to filter out the right EPA form that you want to see from the vast amount of EPA forms in the dashboard. That is why we are now working on reducing the number of EPA forms that have to be filled in.
