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A central obstacle that faces governments and service providers alike is the acute shortage of health professionals — with all projections indicating the situation will certainly worsen as the skilled workforce shortage hits in the coming decades (Health Canada 2006). These issues, along with a heightened public awareness of patient safety issues (Canadian Patient Safety Institute 2002), provide the context for a rejuvenated interest in the healthcare team as the site of both education and service delivery. In Canada, interprofessional collaboration is now the much-vaunted way in which care can be organized and delivered in a safe, effective and sustainable fashion, with high amounts of interest at the federal (Health Canada 2007) and provincial (Health Force Ontario 2007) levels. Given this current preoccupation with collaboration, it is timely to reflect upon the key players in this team, the vexed doctor–nurse relationship, and examine how Leonard Stein's (1967) ‘doctor–nurse game’ is playing out in this new landscape of healthcare quality, team training and patient safety.

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