PET-Health (the Educational Program for Health Work) proposed by the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) and the Niterói Municipal Health Foundation (FMS) began its activities in April 2010 with the purpose of developing a participatory teaching-learning process, with daily work in health services as its central thrust, using health research and evaluation tools as the trigger for learning. The activities are developed from the perspective of developing a health diagnosis in the coverage area of each health unit affiliated with PET. The methodology is participatory research with direct involvement by health professionals, students, users, and faculty. Reconstruction of local history has been used as the research tool, including documents searches and interviews with community members. Important activities include registering and re-registering families and an epidemiological profile of neighborhoods. In this first stage, we identified interaction in a multidisciplinary team as a challenge that has fostered major strides in the shared understanding of the health-disease process by students, faculty, and health professionals.