Locked in for learning

Popular entertainment trend modified for interprofessional experience

Escape rooms began popping up in the Twin Cities over the last few years, with nearly a dozen of them now offering adventure seekers the chance to solve a series of puzzles together in order to be freed from a locked room. 

While most go for the fun, the rooms also offer a chance to test critical thinking skills and use some creativity while working as a team.
It was developing those skills, combined with the obvious fun factor, that led members of the health sciences team that develops interprofessional curriculum to create an escape room that was health care related at the University of Minnesota. 

“We went to an escape room as a team and we had so much fun. We knew we needed to develop one that was health care related and incorporate it into all of our curricula,” said School of Nursing Clinical Associate Professor Cheri Friedrich, DNP, APRN, CPNP, who agreed to lead the charge. 

This past academic year, more than 180 undergraduate students from nursing, dental hygiene, dental therapy, occupational therapy and social work worked as teams of eight to escape from a room in the School of Nursing’s Bentson Healthy Communities Innovation Center. When they entered the room they learned of a 55-year-old man who had a heart attack in a dental chair and was transported to a hospital. Students had to solve puzzles in order to find the key to the heart catheter lab. They had an hour to work their way out of the room and then spent a half-hour debriefing about the experience. Overwhelmingly, students found the experience promoted interprofessional communication and teamwork.

“I loved the challenge of it,” said Jessica Armstrong, in the Master of Nursing program. “It really gets down to why I like health care so much. Everybody comes with different sets of symptoms and experiences and you have to piece it all together in order to figure out what is best for the patient. You have to determine what’s wrong with them and the best way to solve it.”

The faculty is now working on implementing a second escape room, this time involving a patient who has bi-polar disease and diabetes admitted for diabetes ketoacidosis but is now ready for discharge. The challenge will be to create a discharge plan in an hour based on the clues students get from solving puzzles.

“We’re taking it to a whole new level now where they have an outcome they are trying to meet for a patient,” said Friedrich.

The hope is that students will get to experience the first escape room early on in their program and the second one toward the end. They also hope to include students in medicine and pharmacy as well. “It’s been a really fun activity to work on,” said Friedrich. “It’s been exciting to see it evolve.”