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The role and responsibilities of pharmacists have changed considerably over the past decade. Activities like independent prescribing, administering vaccines, and public health screening have fundamentally changed due to what the public expects of pharmacists - and what pharmacists think and believe about their own roles and value contributions to the healthcare system. This thesis questioned the significant value placed on the clinical knowledge, roles, and functions in pharmacy education, coupled with the documented challenges associated with enacting these roles and functions in practice. Alongside, there were conversations about professional identity formation in health professions education, with particular emphasis on the role of professional education and training in guiding identity development. This led to the primary purpose of this thesis, which was to identify discourses (institutionalized ideas, norms, and practices that contribute to the socio-cultural dimensions of the learning environment) at play in pharmacy education and practice that pharmacy students and pharmacists engage with when constructing and performing their professional identities. We aimed to uncover the messages and cues that these discourses convey about what it means to be a pharmacist in the 21st century.

Workplace assessments play a central role in medical further education. Workplace assessments serve two functions: to provide feedback to the trainee physician to promote learning and to enable decisions about their performance and progress. Our studies were conducted at the general practitioner training courses in Maastricht, Nijmegen and Leiden. This shows that users' perceptions of workplace assessments can differ and play a role in its use and interpretation. Also, interactions between users from inside and outside the workplace can influence workplace assessments. For example, at the start of the training, educators base their decision to entrust patients to the trainee physician more on their generic qualities (e.g. asking for help in good time) than on estimated clinical skills. Practical observations of doctors-in-training are also mainly performed because educators believe that this is expected of them, for example by patients, the doctor-in-training or the training institute. The use and purpose of field observations is rarely a topic of discussion between educator and trainee physician. As a result, learning opportunities may be missed. Being aware and discussing one's own views and according them with those of other users can increase the yield of workplace assessments.