Clinical Simulation Escape Rooms are a highly interactive and immersive experience that has the ability to blend the excitement of cryptic puzzles, teamwork and play alongside one another for healthcare professionals in a unique educational experience. This article by Erin Carn-Bennett, RN, MSN will share links to open access resources in order to be able to facilitate a healthcare simulation escape room experience for learners of all clinical backgrounds.Although an exciting opportunity for clinical simulation educators, there can be overwhelm of where precisely to start with the design of a highly impactful clinical simulation escape room experience.
Game and play based educational strategies alongside realistic stories help to form key learning objectives of a healthcare simulation escape room. Clinical simulation educators have a strong foundation to understand that interactive experiences that challenge and involve team dynamics can assist with improved learning outcome success in clinical simulation. Game-based education continues to increase in popularity particularly in the healthcare industry. Many escape room scenarios require skillsets which are found in healthcare simulation. Due to this, clinical simulation educators and programs offer the ideal environment to successfully deliver a high quality escape room experience.
First, be sure to check out the HealthySimulation.com webinar by Carrie Morgan Eaton, PhD, RNC-OB, C-EFM, CHSE on Unlocking Innovation: Using Escape Rooms in Nursing Simulation. While access to the webinar does require subscription to the webinar library, this is an amazing presentation by Dr. Eaton that covers how to use escape rooms to engage nursing students, how to create an escape room for clinical education, and as well various tools and resources.
Laerdal Learn Simulation Escape Room Resources
On the Laerdal Simulation Escape Room Resources page there is a freely available and open access collection of tools to help plan healthcare simulation escape rooms. Within this resource there are webinars available to watch related to the topic of how to get started with healthcare simulation escape rooms. Laerdal interviewed Janine Valko, MSN, BN, CEN, a clinical simulation education manager from STAR Center at the Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Jane has many years of experience in formulation of plans, design, and facilitation of healthcare simulation escape rooms.
The Laerdal Learn page also provides a downloadable clinical simulation escape room workbook alongside videos and articles about how to design and deliver a healthcare simulation escape room. There is also a checklist available which assists readers to be able to figure out how their healthcare organization can benefit from an escape room experience. In provided articles on the Laerdal Learn page, there are explanations of what clinical simulation escape rooms are and how they can effectively be used to meet predefined learning objectives.
Examples on Laerdal Learn include those which include a patient case that has a story that has been woven through the healthcare simulation escape room experience. This example of a clinical simulation escape room allows for realism and hands-on clinical skills practice. Participants work together in the escape room examples provided to locate clues and solve puzzles that test clinical reasoning understanding and lead to the ability to save the patient.
View the HealthySimulation.com Webinar Unlocking Innovation: Using Escape Rooms in Nursing Simulation to learn more!
CAN SIM Downloadable Sepsis Escape Room Scenario
The Canadian Alliance of Nurse Educators Using Simulation (CAN SIM) have an open access downloadable healthcare simulation escape room scenario. The downloadable resource includes checklists for equipment required to run the healthcare simulation escape room scenario and also how to run the clinical simulation escape room.
Learning Objectives of the CAN Sim Escape Room include:
- Recognition of patient that exhibits SIRS criteria.
- Demonstration of activation of emergency response systems
- Model professional behaviors
- Demonstrate use of SBAR communication.
- Demonstrate effective communication with patient, family, and other team members.
- Demonstrate effective team work and management of the patient.
- Analyze patient status and include possible causes and expected interventions.
- Utilize Sepsis checklist throughout
Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN)
AORN has shared a resource article of s.
The article offers worksheets and resources to be able to organize clinical simulation escape room experiences. The six design elements discussed include: participant characteristics, learning objectives and outcomes, theme, puzzles and equipment, debrief, and evaluation.
A system to plan and test clinical simulation escape rooms is necessary to design this learning experience due to their complex nature. Example healthcare simulation escape room documents such as blank escape room worksheets and example escape rooms for preoperative patient assessment, safe patient transfers, skin antisepsis, and time-out protocol for novice nurses are able to be downloaded. Checklists and tools that assist to plan escape rooms assist to simplify the process for escape room design.
University of Kansas Health System Escape Room Guide
The University of Kansas Health System has an open access downloadable PDF with a literal grab and go guide for an escape room from planning through to prior to debrief. There is a huge amount of resources and tips for facilitation shared in the document.
Some of the resources provided include:
- Overview of the Escape Room
- Flow of the Escape Room
- Room layout floor plan
- Equipment required list
- Puzzle pieces
- USB drive
- Create a password-protected document and password-protected document example
- Glucometer sign, decoder card, insulin pen and decoder wristband
- Falls bundle
- Maze (decoy)
- Locks and codes
- Rules of the room and reset guideline
- FAQs and tools to build a personalised escape room
Sim2Grow Simulation Solutions Unlock Student Engagement: Create Your DIY Nursing Escape Room!
In the Sim2Grow article e. Traci has designed nearly 25 escape rooms over the past five years and shares her recommendations for the creative process to make engaging healthcare simulation escape room experiences for clinical simulation participants.
Eight steps to create successful nursing escape rooms shared include:
- Form a small design team.
- Choose a topic and theme.
- Establish logistics.
- Set clear learning objectives.
- Use a well-structured escape room template.
- Develop puzzles and clues.
- Recruit a dry run team.
- Conduct dry runs, make necessary tweaks, and repeat.
A number of top tips and resources are included in the article by Traci including how to incorporate non medical examples into an escape room. To get started, some ready-made escape rooms created by Sim2Grow are available to download. These include: Med Room Mayhem, Mock Code Mystery and Accreditation Escape Room.
This article has discussed a number of open access, freely available for download resources that relate to healthcare simulation escape rooms. The healthcare simulation community is incredibly generous and there are so many resources easily available for clinical simulation educators to be able to use for escape rooms. Escape rooms are an impactful way to be able to engage learners of all ages to have fun and make strides towards improvements to workplace culture.
Read More on Escape Rooms in Sim: Downloadable Sepsis Scenario
