An online escape room used to support the growth of teamwork in health professions students

Abstract

Effective teamwork in the online environment is essential to patient care and safety. The need for training health professionals to work together on a virtual interprofessional team has become even more important since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as telehealth, or the provision of virtual healthcare to patients, has become more common. This resource describes the development of an online escape room activity using free online resources. The activity aimed to enhance health profession students' abilities to communicate effectively, work together to complete a task, and develop knowledge of the unique roles of healthcare team members in a course dedicated to interprofessional education. Teams of five to seven students met online and completed seven puzzles to escape a virtual room. Results obtained from the pre-post surveys of 176 students across six disciplines showed the activity aided in increasing participants perceptions of their ability to communicate respectfully and work together to complete a task, while developing knowledge of the unique roles of members of the healthcare team, all components of the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) Core Competencies. This activity lays the groundwork for collaborative, interprofessional activities, such as telehealth, which students will be exposed to in their futures, and the results infer that the activity can help to build collaboration among team members, even team members that are not in the same physical space.