Transformers have recently gained considerable popularity for capturing long-range dependencies in the medical image segmentation. However, most transformer-based segmentation methods primarily focus on modeling global dependencies and fail to fully explore the complementary nature of different dimensional dependencies within features. These methods simply treat the aggregation of multi-dimensional dependencies as auxiliary modules for incorporating context into the Transformer architecture, thereby limiting the model’s capability to learn rich feature representations. To address this issue, we introduce the Dual Attention Encoder with Joint Preservation (DANIE) for medical image segmentation, which synergistically aggregates spatial-channel dependencies across both local and global areas through attention learning. Additionally, we design a lightweight aggregation mechanism, termed Joint Preservation, which learns a composite feature representation, allowing different dependencies to complement each other. Without bells and whistles, our DANIE significantly improves the performance of previous state-of-the-art methods on five popular medical image segmentation benchmarks, including Synapse, ACDC, ISIC 2017, ISIC 2018 and GlaS.