Background The pre-hospital process is a complex one involving aspects such as medical skills as well as care taking, team performance, inter-organizational cooperation and communication. This calls for novel training methods and technology support. Our review of literature (covering the areas of pre-hospital care, training simulator technologies and methods and process modelling) indicates that the different aspects are typically trained in isolation, e.g. medical skills using patient simulators.Objective The pre-hospital training center project addresses the overall complexity of the pre-hospital process by taking all of the aspects into account when designing scenarios and technology support for training the complete prehospital process (covering alarm, on-scene activities, transportation and hand-over). This is indeed a challenging task as we need to develop both training methods and technology support for a very complex training situation.Methods The project will develop a prototype scenario along with technology support to enact it. The training scenario will involve many of the aspects listed above and will be tested in a field experiment with ambulance personnel. Results The expected outcome of the project is a platform for establishing a pre-hospital simulation and training center. The initial technologies, research results and experiences will be used to form a consortium for further work and development. Conclusions We have identified a need for a pre-hospital training center with the unique and ambitious idea of covering the entire pre-hospital process as well as its many interacting aspects. To the best of our knowledge this approach is not at all common and we expect the complexity to be so high that it is a challenging enough research area that can only be addressed if we have a well-designed simulation and training center in place with all the different areas of knowledge represented, i.e. pre-hospital medicine as well as simulation and visualization technology.