Since 1st October 2003 the new German "Approbationsordnung für Arzte" (Medical Licensing Regulations) requires an increasing amount of small group teaching sessions and encourages a multidisciplinary and more practical approach to the related topics. In 2004 the German Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine has provided almost all anaesthesia faculties of German Universities with equipment for full-scale simulation. This article describes methods for a simulation-based medical education training program. Basic requirements for a successful training program using full scale simulators are the provision of an adequate logistical and material infrastructure, teacher attendance of train-the-trainer courses, implementation in the medical curriculum and an instructor-student ratio of 1:3, equivalent to that for bedside teaching. If these requirements were fulfilled, medical students scored the simulation scenarios "induction of anaesthesia", "acute pulmonary embolism", "acute management of a multiple trauma patient" and "postoperative hypotension" as 1.5, 1.6, 1.5 and 1.5, respectively, on a scale of 1-6. These scores were better than those given for other segments of the curriculum.