A palliative care escape room: too serious or a game changer?

Harris, Dylan 2025. A palliative care escape room: too serious or a game changer? Presented at: Heriot Watt University Learning and Teaching Academy: Escape rooms in education showcase 2025, Online, 14-15 May 2025.

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Escape rooms have become a recognised teaching technique in healthcare education. Palliative care is the holistic care of people with advanced progressive life-limiting illness, especially those near the end of life. Palliative care is an important aspect of the education/training of all healthcare professionals. It is a serious an emotive topic area - is it suitable for the escape room concept? METHOD We designed a palliative care escape room containing a series of physical puzzles relating to a patient and his symptoms as he approached the end of life (e.g. choosing between different medication bottles based on the description of symptoms). Learners then put the letters they collect from each puzzle into the padlock to see if they escape from the room. In the debriefing the facilitator explores the learning objective behind each puzzle with the learners. The aim is to facilitate the integrated model of transfer of learning with integrated instruction, ‘productive failure’ and contrasting cases. We tested the concept initially with a faculty group, and then with two groups of postgraduate healthcare professionals (one with a group of GP trainee doctors, one with a group of multi-professional learners of doctors and nurses). RESULT Of the learners who completed the anonymous feedback all ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ on a 5 point Likert scale that they would recommend a teaching session in this format. Learners felt the format “facilitated team work”, improved the application of their knowledge and a number of them used the word “fun”. None described any reservations about use of the escape room concept in the context of learning related to palliative and end of life care. Following these initial pilots to test the concept, further use of the escape room is now scheduled to build the volume of learner feedback for further evaluation and development.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Lecture)
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Postgraduate Medical and Dental Education
Subjects:	L Education > L Education (General) R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Date of Acceptance:	2025
Last Modified:	23 May 2025 11:44
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/178407

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item