In April 2005, the medical science departments at the University of Bristol were designated by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) as a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). As a result we were awarded funding of 4.5 million pounds in order to establish the AIMS Centre (Applied and Integrated Medical Sciences). The award was part of a competitive, national initiative by HEFCE to establish around 70 CETLs nationwide in order to ‘ …recognise and reward excellent teaching practice, and to further invest in that practice…’. The Department of Physiology has played a leading role in establishing the AIMS Centre, which will focus on practical teaching in the fields of anatomy, physiology, pharmacology and histology. One major initiative within the CETL is the integration of our existing undergraduate practical teaching in physiology and pharmacology with the use of high fidelity, computer-controlled Human Patient Simulators or manikins. The latter can be used to simulate physiological responses in extreme environments (such as high altitude), intense exercise and pathological situations such as haemorrhage and airway obstruction that cannot be demonstrated using healthy students. Manikins can also be used to illustrate the changes that occur in homeostatic mechanisms throughout the ageing process. We plan to incorporate the manikins into our existing teaching in ways that will enable undergraduates to continue to make physiological measurements on themselves and each other at rest and during exercise, but to enable them also to record the simulated responses that might be obtained if the same measurements had been obtained, for example, from normal subjects exposed to a range of extreme environments or an intensive exercise regime. We also plan to develop case studies and scenarios that simulate pathophysiological situations in order to reinforce understanding of normal physiological processes. The CETL funding will enable us to purchase two Human Patient Simulators that will be used in all of our undergraduate degree programmes – medical, dental, veterinary science and BSc.