Abstract: The goal of training programs in healthcare is to facilitate the development of knowledge, techniques, skills, attitudes and/or experience which professionals need to successfully do their job. This includes profession-specific activities as well as common transversal activities with which they contribute to the best healthcare possible. A key feature of this "development" is that it requires time, and therefore, to facilitate that development, we need an approach that accounts for this longitudinal factor. Besides, the healthcare system is a complex and dynamic environment, designed fundamentally for the clinical care of patients, in which professionals must be prepared to demonstrate a high performance in a wide variety of situations. This article reviews the most important literature on longitudinal approaches to professional training and types of designs with a scientific rigor that allow us to draw valid conclusions regarding the development of interest. The result of this review is a methodology that integrates the most important principles of a type of design called single case design (SCD) and the framework of entrustable professional activities (EPAs) which helps us to define professional activities and to design training interventions to prepare professionals for these professional activities. We propose to call this methodology SCD-EPA, uniting the names of the design and framework that are integrated. Through examples, this article demonstrates that SCD-EPA can be used for both profession-specific and transversal themes and for combinations of activities as well as for a single activity.
