Escaping a Pandemic: Utilizing an Escape Room to Increase Learner Engagement in Infection Prevention and Control Education

Abstract

Background : Healthcare professionals attempting to provide education understand the significance of active learner engagement and its impact on outcomes; however, engaging learners in reoccurring mandatory training that lack motivating factors is difficult. Deploying Escape Rooms as voluntary education to augment mandatory annual trainings has increased learner engagement among Clinical and Non-Clinical staff. Participants were given a pandemic, novel flu scenario and asked to select appropriate personal protective equipment prior to entering the Escape Room. Once inside, objectives included collaborating as a team to mitigate the spread of disease, evaluating environmental surfaces that play a role in disease transmission, and demonstrating at least 3 moments of hand hygiene while completing job duties. In debriefing, participants analyzed their performance and were asked to hypothesize how their roles would change during a pandemic. Methods : The Escape Room ran every half hour over four days for teams of 3-5, providing 48 opportunities for interactive learning. The scenario consisted of collecting nasal swabs and demographic information from six patients. After pre-briefing, participants had 10 minutes to complete the scenario. Teams of participants completed pre- and post-simulation surveys with multiple choice and open-ended questions. Results : Voluntary education increased from an average of 20, clinical discipline participants per training to 189 clinical and non-clinical learners. In subsequent simulations, employees who attended the Escape Room actively contributed to high-consequence infectious disease policies and procedures while employees who did not attend the Escape Room were disengaged in the ongoing pandemic preparations. Conclusions : Although Escape Rooms were conceived as a social activity, they are quickly yielding themselves as a low-cost, high-impact and effective tool for healthcare education. Despite the low level of perceived pandemic threat at the time, the Pandemic Escape Room yielded a high volume of learners who frequently request additional Escape Room offerings.