Once each team completed the mission (or in a couple of cases, some didnt), the teams debriefed with Gabriel, McPeake, and Lieb who informally evaluated the participants understanding of sepsis.

Over the past several years, themed escape rooms for team-building events has been all the craze.

And while a recent survey conducted by the Sepsis Alliance found that sepsis awareness has increased in the U.S.

One of the main reasons we decided to create an escape room was so we could include people who werent nurses without as much of a background with sepsis knowledge, Gabriel explains.

Gabriel, MSN-RN, and Casey Lieb, MSN-RN, nurses at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, a 355-bed acute care hospital in Philadelphia, and members of Penn Medicine Sepsis Alliance education team, were tasked with creatively educating their healthcare colleagues on sepsis awareness for World Sepsis Day last September.

The original idea for the escape room started in 2017 when Lauren McPeake, RN, BSN, created a simulation-based escape room to educate the nurses on her geriatric unit on the care of sepsis.

I noticed frustrations around how many orders are generated when doctors think a patient is thought to be septic, she says.

I also noticed that people didnt understand why they were doing certain things, so I chose sepsis as the first simulation.

The simulation-based escape room was a hit with McPeakes colleagues, which sparked the idea of an interdisciplinary escape room for World Sepsis Day.

Stroke Games For Nurses Full Support Of

Gabriel and Lieb had the full support of leadership when discussing their ideas to promote sepsis awareness.

Stroke Games For Nurses How To Promote Sepsis

Members of the Penn Medicine Sepsis Alliance Education and Communications workgroup presented different ideas of how to promote sepsis awareness to the hospital board, and the board supported the idea of the escape room overwhelmingly.

Most people that have been through an escape room thought it would be an interesting way to get the word out about sepsis awareness, and we also wanted to create buzz around the Sepsis Alliance, says Gabriel.

How the escape room works A variety of healthcare professionalssocial workers, physical therapists, physicians, nursing assistants, nursing students, members of the infection prevention team, and quality team staffsigned up online to participate in the escape room, according to Lieb.

In the Penn Presbyterian sepsis escape room, teams of six to eight people were locked in together and asked to use critical-thinking skills and teamwork to complete a mission to learn about sepsis.

The teams had 25 minutes to detect and treat sepsis in a mock patient before they could escape the room.

They did this by solving four puzzles and responding to clues.

One puzzle teammates had to solve involved an IV pump set up with four antibiotics that were tangled together and only two working IVs.

The team needed to determine, with the help of distractors, which antibiotics to run and what order needed to be administered.

The escape room format allows different types of learning, so you have people that are auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learners and they can touch things and talk through things.

You have to use your critical-thinking skills and think outside the box, Gabriel says.

Theres that pressure element of having to escape something in a certain amount of time and you know its a different way of learning, compared to the traditional, Come and sit in a classroom and have somebody give you information.

The escape room was open from 5 a.m.

Gabriel.

Gabriel and Lieb oversaw the escape room event throughout the day.