Multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary working has for long been advocated in gerontology, and sometimes contested. Although collaboration between disciplines is common practice in many areas of ageing research, much remains to be done to develop and support such work. Internationally, funding agencies, scientific associations and other stakeholders in ageing research are actively involved in establishing the methods and means to promote cross-disciplinary co-operation in the field. In the United Kingdom (UK) since the late 1990s, the statutory Research Councils with key interests in ageing and older people have been actively pursuing research programmes that feature multi-disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity. The National Collaboration on Ageing Research (NCAR), a partnership among four of the Research Councils to stimulate cross-disciplinary collaboration, worked with scientists, funding bodies, and research users to develop approaches to multi- and inter-disciplinary research, and their work informed the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) Programme, a major cross-Research Council programme of multi-disciplinary research which spans the social, medical, biological and engineering sciences and the arts and humanities. Drawing on the authors' participation in these activities, this article reviews key developments in the promotion of multi-disciplinary science on ageing in the UK and highlights how this is being pursued in the NDA Programme.

There is a policy drive in the UK National Health Services (NHS) towards public involvement in service, education and research, with a number of national initiatives such as INVOLVE that have championed effective user input on research and development (R&D). The requisites of research governance include a balance of professional and public input, and the structures for this now exist at primary care level. There is a need for examples of how such policies can be implemented in Primary Care Trusts, and this article aims to show in detail the way in which a systematic approach to user involvement in R&D has been implemented. The PPIRes (Public and Patient Involvement in Research) project, whose progress over two years from 2003 to 2005 is reported, has been funded by NHS R&D monies allocated through a research consortium in Norfolk, and has been hosted in an NHS – academic partnership between Norwich Primary Care Trust and the Institute of Health at the University of East Anglia. The profile of volunteers, recommendations for good practice in public involvement, and the ‘facilitators and challenges’ to the programme are described.