The development of a theory-informed Communities of Practice Framework for pharmacy and other professional healthcare education programmes

This paper describes the development of a novel Communities of Practice (CoP) theory-informed framework. The CoP framework, developed through a rigorous process of extensive review of the literature and peer review by selected healthcare education scholars, comprises six key components: enablers, challenges, curriculum, teaching strategies, assessment, and outcomes. The CoP framework provides a basic conceptual structure to align CoP learning theory to educational practice, in order to understand the interaction between learning theories and educational practices and to reduce the possible disconnect within this interaction. It can be used as a theoretical instrument to inform the design of new professional healthcare education programmes or to analyse the evidence of CoP application in existing programmes. This is important to reduce the gap between learning theory and educational practices in programme design, and to enhance students’ learning experience.