Escape rooms help students tackle uncertainty

Uncertainty is ubiquitous among healthcare professionals but methods to help students prepare for it are lacking. Jenny Moffet’s PhD research shows that digital escape rooms can provide a solution by triggering incidents of uncertainty and allowing students to share their experiences with peers. Moffett defended her PhD at the faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Utrecht University on 11 September 2024.

Many people enjoy escape rooms as a source of entertainment and an opportunity to escape reality. Researcher Jenny Moffett, however, has been designing digital escape rooms that encourage participants to face reality rather than escape it. Moffett works as an educationalist at the Health Profession’s Education Centre at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). Her games help medical students prepare for the uncertainty they encounter in their clinical placements. By mimicking clinical scenarios, students can practice virtually before they go out into the real world.

Dealing with uncertainty

“Students want to put down their books and meet patients, but patient healthcare is rife with uncertainty”, Moffett explains. “From helping patients track down a diagnosis to working out treatment protocols. It is something that already arises during students’ undergraduate programmes, especially when they transition from the classroom to the clinic. While this issue is widely recognised in many healthcare fields, including veterinary medicine, there are few guidelines on how to prepare students to deal with uncertainty.”

As health professionals, we tend to try and mask our uncertainty because we are afraid of looking stupid.

This inspired Moffett to develop a digital escape room. The game was kept deliberately simple. Students work together in teams and have 30 minutes to solve puzzles built into an interactive slide deck. The puzzles aim to simulate uncertainty and trigger emotions that students face during their clinical placements. Moffett: “In the game, students engage in rapid problem solving with people they have never met. This can lead to conflict, a fear of failure, or being afraid to speak up. While we can never take away these emotions with our training, we can simulate them.”

Changing the culture

The game also enables students to reflect on their experiences with fellow students. “Debriefing is a key part of the game”, says Moffett. “As health professionals, we tend to try and mask our uncertainty because we are afraid of looking stupid. But if we are not open about uncertainty, we may miss things or make incorrect decisions. So, we need to change the culture of medicine such that we feel more comfortable sharing our uncertainties.”

Collaborative design process

Moffett co-created the escape room with a team of medical students using design thinking, with support from educationalists and graphics designers. Together, they engaged in an iterative process of designing, testing, getting feedback, and making adjustments. “One of the key elements was involving medical students from an early stage, enabling us to include the reality of uncertainty from their perspective”, Moffett says.

The escape room is now available to year three medical students at RCSI. In her dissertation, Moffett also presents a set of practical design principles aimed at helping others to create their own escape rooms. People have already been inspired by Moffett’s game so we may just see more escape rooms finding their way into classrooms in the future to further improve healthcare education.