The founder and director of the Medical Simulation Center at Sheba Medical Center, Dr. Amitai Ziv, was recognized last week for his efforts. He received the Charles Bronfman Humanitarian Award ($100,000), which is given to "an individual or team of people under the age of 50 whose Jewish values infuse their humanitarian accomplishments and provide inspiration for the next generation."

Leah and David, an ultra-Orthodox couple, brought their son to the hospital last Saturday night after he stopped breathing. They did not understand the meaning behind the questions the medical staff was asking, and antagonistically asked the attending social worker if she suspected they had done something to him.

When the doctors restored the boy's pulse, the parents asked them, "You're not Jewish, are you?"

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The Arab doctor and nurse responded that this was irrelevant.

This type of scenario occurs every day in Israeli hospitals, but last week the parents were actors, participants in an exercise conducted at the Medical Simulation Center (MSR in Hebrew) at Sheba Medical Center. The care providers were workers from Yoseftal Hospital in Eilat. The child was a sophisticated doll controlled remotely from an adjacent room.

After the exercise, the staff moved into a conference room for a detailed debriefing and performance analysis - how quickly the workers identified the medical problem and how they responded to the parents.

The MSR, which has 30 simulation rooms, is the largest of its kind in Israel and one of the largest in the world. The center is designed to minimize the number of mistakes that could cost patient lives.

Ziv says an estimated 2,000 patients die in Israel each year due to erroneous medical treatment. This figure is four times the number of traffic casualties.

Ziv likens the center to a flight simulator, an education method he knows from his military service as a fighter pilot.

"I crashed with the simulator dozens of times, but not even once with a real plane," he says.

Ziv's efforts in establishing the MSR were recognized last week when he received the Charles Bronfman Humanitarian Award ($100,000), Every day dozens of medical personnel - doctors, nurses and medics - come to the center to face situations that occur daily in hospitals. There are also training sessions for army personnel, who wear combat uniforms, complete with protective vests and helmets, and provide first aid to injured soldiers "on the battlefield."

The adult-size dolls wear blood-soaked uniforms. One doll has had its foot blown off. A machine emits thick smoke, and the sounds of gunfire and explosions echo in the air. A technician sitting in front of three computer monitors in the control room can give the wounded soldier complications with the push of a button, such as internal bleeding, a previously undetected head injury, falling blood pressure, low pulse and even death.

Ziv says Israel Defense Forces medical teams came to train at the MSR during the Second Lebanon War.

One of the videos in the MSR's library shows the head of a hospital oncology ward telling a man waiting in the hall that his wife has died in the operating room. The man starts crying bitterly and collapses against the wall.

"We introduce the teams that train here to the toughest moments in their profession, exposing them to nightmare situations," says Ziv. "One of our goals is to bring these people to their limits."

Some 30,000 personnel have trained at the MSR, and now medical schools are demanding candidates come here for testing. MSR staff cannot say how many unnecessary deaths the center has prevented, but are convinced that the exercises and the subsequent debriefing improve the quality of medicine at Israeli hospitals.