It has been nearly fifty years since the first calls for the development of interprofessional practice in the health service were first muted by the government. Over the intervening four decades there have been a number of short-term initiatives and attempts made to address the problem. These seldom resulted in changes to practice or policy within the National Health Service. Many of these interventions were well developed and organised but had short life spans mainly due to changes in the lead staff or the lack of funding.

Since September 2003 a project designed to develop shared learning has been in progress between the two universities in Aberdeen or more precisely the School of Pharmacy at The Robert Gordon University and the Medical School at the University of Aberdeen. The primary purpose of the project is to instigate and analyse the opportunities for shared learning that could be developed between pharmacy and medical students. One of the unique features of this project is that the researcher appointed to manage the project is a joint employee of each university and has a base in each one, reporting to each but with a joint advisory group from both. This is shared learning with shared aims and objectives and a shared research fellow.

An attitudinal questionnaire on team working and shared learning has been completed by first and final year students in the undergraduate pharmacy and medical programmes. This was based on the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) developed by the University of Liverpool in the 1990s. Several one day shared learning workshops using problem based learning have also been run and each has been evaluated by both the students and staff for their learning outcomes. A shared learning virtual classroom has been developed and a prescribing skills revision course will be run during February 2004 for four weeks for the final year pharmacy and medical students. Preliminary results from this course will be analysed and the results presented at a later date. Shared e-learning is being investigated as a useful method to help solve the problem of crowded and incompatible timetables. So many shared learning projects have floundered on the rocks of timetable clashes and this course is seen as being one of the answers to the perennial problem of crowded curricula.

This paper seeks to review what opportunities for shared learning exist for doctors and pharmacists and to address the problem of transferring shared learning into interprofessional practice. The arguments for and against the educational theories of shared and problem–based learning in developing team work in health care professionals will be discussed and future research will be identified and suggested. It will also analyse the first results from the project and discuss the results of the questionnaires and the issues raised for the development of further shared learning initiatives.