Transition to practice in pharmacy: An ill-defined concept?

Abstract

Commonly described as the passage from school to practice, transition to practice, as a concept, as yet to be explored in-depth, is clearly circumscribed and conceptualised to better address the issues experienced by new health professionals when they begin their professional practice. This study intends to describe how the process of transition to practice is represented and studied within various health disciplines, particularly in pharmacy. A scoping review design was chosen to sort out a corpus of published papers on the transition to practice. The primary objectives of this review are to clarify the key concepts related to the transition to practice, make sense of the available literature and evidence on the transition to practice in health disciplines, detect gaps in the current knowledge, particularly in pharmacy, and identify relevant lines of inquiry that would provide a better understanding of this critical and vital process.