TY  - JOUR
T1  - Learning Across Pharmacy Placements Without Losing the Thread: How Conflicting Practice Norms and Dispersed Supervision Shape the Continuity of Professional Development
A1  - Michael Osei
A1  - Elena Petrova
A1  - David Park
JF  - Annals of Pharmacy Education, Safety, and Public Health Advocacy
JO  - Ann Pharm Educ Saf Public Health Advocacy
SN  - 3108-4850
Y1  - 2026
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
DO  - 10.51847/N0Zfrw1v1V
SP  - 94
EP  - 107
N2  - Pharmacy education increasingly depends on learning distributed across multiple practice environments, supervisors, professional teams, and assessment episodes. Sequence alone, however, does not ensure that experiences accumulate into coherent professional development. This article examines continuity as a multilevel educational problem involving the learner, placement environment, supervisor relationships, and programme-level structures that connect otherwise separate episodes of workplace learning. A Multilevel Continuity Model is developed to explain how learners carry prior understanding into new sites, how local practice norms shape participation, how supervisory relationships preserve or interrupt developmental knowledge, and how programme mechanisms can integrate experiences across placements. The analysis distinguishes productive contextual variation from unresolved norm conflict and treats distributed supervision as potentially developmental when information, interpretation, and responsibility are transferred effectively. The central contribution is an account of longitudinal professional learning in which continuity depends on connections across experiences rather than simple repetition or prolonged exposure. The model therefore predicts that educational fragmentation can occur despite extensive placement time, while coherent development can emerge across heterogeneous sites when linking mechanisms preserve developmental meaning. Longitudinal pharmacy education should consequently be designed around the quality of cross-level connections among experiences, actors, expectations, and developmental information.
UR  - https://smerpub.com/article/learning-across-pharmacy-placements-without-losing-the-thread-how-conflicting-practice-norms-and-di-54wxvs068dnvdbl
ER  -