Colorado care sites use escape rooms as innovative way to make education engaging

Care site educators are continuously looking for ways to more actively engage caregivers while enhancing their education in order to ensure our clinical teams are providing the highest quality of care to our patients.??

At Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver, CO and St. Mary’s Medical Center in Grand Junction, CO, the Education teams wanted a more creative and fun way to teach nurses during annual skills fairs, which typically include classroom and e-learning, posters and skills checkoffs. To create a more engaging experience, they designed escape rooms to facilitate hands-on learning.??

In the escape rooms, nurses enter with no prior knowledge of the situation they’re walking into. The team reads a scenario and must work together to answer a series of hidden clues correctly. Subsequent clues and challenges are not presented until the task at hand is correctly solved, and the nurses are on the clock to make their way through the escape room within a specific amount of time.

Hundreds of nurses from multiple service lines including Med Surg, Cardiac Labor & Delivery and the Emergency Room have participated at both care sites over the last few years. At. St. Mary’s, the Family Medicine residents also went through the escape room. The escape rooms are designed to replicate patient rooms, and the nurses are presented with real-world scenarios and must work as a team to solve them. Each room and scenario are based on regulations required annually by the Joint Commission.

Platte Valley Medical Center in Brighton, CO applied a creative twise to make its 2023 Skills Fair more engaging. The fair featured a fun carnival theme; Skills Fair instructors designed education and a game to accompany each topic for more than 300 caregivers who went through 12 stations over the course of four days.

“The escape rooms are an excellent tool to help educate our nurses in an engaging way,” said Tiffany Martens, St. Mary’s Infection Prevention nurse educator. “They help foster teamwork and collaboration that will serve them well at the bedside. I love having an interactive platform that provides face-to-face learning. It’s an interactive module and allows them to engage in various educational formats, and we modify the exercises as needed.”

The benefits of escape rooms include enhanced creativity and adaptability, problem-solving skills, communication and teamwork, practical experience, evaluation and feedback, skill retention and enhanced patient safety. Ultimately, the improved skills and knowledge gained from hands-on training contribute to the delivery of high-quality patient care, leading to better patient outcomes.

“The escape rooms are more innovative and fun than doing a four-hour lecture, and we’ve had overwhelming positive feedback from the nurses,” said Amanda Feild, director of Nursing Professional Practice and Magnet Program at Saint Joseph Hospital. “This has proven to be an effective learning tool because it helps the nurses think more critically and it’s fun, so people are more likely to remember what they learned.”