Dazed and disoriented, the 22-year-old from the 101st Airborne Division lies on a gurney, a golf ball-size wound penetrating his torso. An army team—surgeon, anesthetist, nurse, and two medics—reassures the soldier then attempts to stabilize his condition. They administer fluids and monitor his vital signs. The surgeon orders more units of blood and drug injections.

This could be a lifesaving operation at a mobile army surgical hospital in the Middle East, where medical teams regularly treat soldiers wounded by gunfire and roadside bombs. It’s not. It was a June 2008 training at the University of Miami/ Jackson Memorial Hospital Center for Patient Safety, where high-tech, “talking” mannequins allow instructors to reenact medical scenarios and procedures.

The center’s mission is to reduce medical errors through simulated exercises that teach everyone from students to residents—and now army clinical teams—how to perfect procedures, communicate effectively, and handle emergencies.

Training medical teams before they ship out to Iraq and Afghanistan is one of the four-year-old center’s newest functions. “When we started the center, we weren’t even imagining that we’d be able to carry out the scenarios we perform today,” says David Birnbach, vice provost and professor of anesthesiology and public health, who directs the center. “As we’ve gained experience and the simulator technology has improved, so has our popularity—and our ability to mimic real crisis situations.”

The Center for Patient Safety has “extraordinary support” from the University, Jackson Memorial Hospital, and training expert Eduardo Salas and his University of Central Florida colleagues, Birnbach adds, and received a more than $400,000 federal grant to research ways to design safer hospitals and decrease the risk of hospital- acquired infections.

Military medical staff also do a rotation at Ryder Trauma Center’s U.S. Army Trauma Training Center (ATTC), where they’re exposed to real gunshot wounds, burns, blast injuries, and other types of severe trauma cases they’ll encoun-ter once they deploy.

But the Center for Patient Safety training is different.

Lt. Col. Donald W. Robinson, ATTC director, calls it “chaos in a controlled environment. We’re trying to get them to understand what’s going to happen in a combat environment and to build a common language for teamwork.”

The scenarios, based on cases Robinson encountered as chief of trauma at Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad, are conducted with real instruments in real operating rooms. The center’s simulation training team watches and regulates the mannequin’s vital signs from a control room. The procedure is videotaped.

“In our scenario development, we try to account for every possible contingency,” says Joshua Lenchus, assistant professor of clinical medicine and associate director of the Center for Patient Safety. “Better they make the mistake here than on a real patient.”

Finally, the team is debriefed and given feedback for improvement. “Everything about their performance is recorded and can be evaluated,” Birnbach notes.