Interruptions are common in community pharmacy, but interruption counts alone provide an incomplete account of dispensing safety. An interruption can occur while little task state needs to be remembered, during a sequence whose verification context must later be reconstructed, or because another activity has become more urgent. These events impose different recovery demands. This conceptual article develops a Sociotechnical Interruption–Resumption Safety Model linking interruption characteristics with cognitive recovery, unfinished-task state, workflow organization, technology, and the distribution of work. The central mechanism is the quality of task resumption: safety depends on what information survives the interruption, what must be reconstructed, what cues and checkpoints are available, and whether competing demands permit verification before work continues. Evidence from community pharmacy, medication administration, healthcare human factors, task-interruption research, and clinical technology shows that interruption consequences vary with timing, task complexity, fatigue, cue availability, workflow conditions, and the informational value of the interrupting event. The model therefore predicts heterogeneous consequences even at similar interruption frequencies. Community-pharmacy safety strategies should preserve resumable task state, support deliberate reconstruction when state has been lost, and organize work so that high-consequence tasks are resumed with appropriate contextual and verification support.
