WEscape – Escape room games for undergraduate interprofessional learning based on patient examples

Background

Health professionals are one of the crucial parts of a well functioning health system. Effective patient-oriented care can only be guaranteed by increasing the co-operation of health professionals (Jacobs et al., 2020).

Poor interprofessional collaboration can lead to job dissatisfaction among team members, a decrease in the number of staff and a low level of staff commitment to organizational matters. To prepare health professionals to work in interprofessional teams, it is necessary to adapt education and training to equip them with the necessary skills to cope with these challenges (Jacobs et al., 2020).

Gaming and in particular escape room activities have been introduced as a learning strategy to enhance soft skills (Guckian et al., 2020). Especially in a medical environment, serious games can be used as a tool for team building. Escape activities are particularly effective tools for interprofessional education and for teaching teamwork (Zhang et al., 2018) and communication skills (Diemer et al., 2019; Morrell & Eukel, 2020; Zhang et al., 2018), which are a critical component of patient safety and a core competency for medical practice.

Project

We are currently developing a prototype of an escape room style video game, meant for undergraduate interprofessional learning. This video game is based on and working with patient examples.