The areas of application of modern patient simulators are becoming more widely. Many different medical areas are using simulation in many different ways, e.g. basic education, advanced training, research and even performance assessment [1][2]. One of them is research on human factors, human limitations and medical ergonomics [3].Moreover, the methodology of simulation based trainings and the environment of modern simulation centres provides a perfect playground to introduce new medical devices to healthcare practitioners.

This study investigated failures of prospective memory (PM) as a relevant but neglected error type in medicine. A patient simulator was used to investigate PM failures. The influence of subjective importance (high, low) and type of intention (educational, internal, external) on the (missed) execution of intention was investigated in a 2 × 2 design. The effects on missed executions by importance (high < low) and type of intention (educational < external < internal) were hypothesized. Of 73 valid intentions in 40 prepared simulator scenarios 19 (26%) were missed overall. A total of 64% of unimportant and 80% of important intentions were executed 79% of educational 67% of external and 72% of internal intentions were executed. Neither difference was statistically significant using χ2 tests. Interaction was significant for missed executions (p = 0.025; n = 19; df = 2; χ2 = 7.41) and for executions (p = 0.002; n = 54; df = 2; χ2 = 12.50). Despite low statistical support and some methodological limitations, it was possible to show that PM failures are relevant to patient safety and that patient simulators are a suitable but so far unused tool for their investigation.