Document resource
Objectives Escape rooms have become increasingly popular in medical education. It’s a fun learner-centred interactive way to teach whilst also developing skills such as team working. An opportunity arose to re-design the undergraduate medical student placement at our inpatient hospice with the return to face-to-face teaching after the pandemic.Methods A ‘Holistic Hospice’ themed escape room was designed and implemented into the second-year medical undergraduate teaching programme to meet the palliative care curriculum learning objectives in a novel way. Nine puzzles were designed and the participants had 45 minutes to solve them to ‘escape’ the room. Feedback was collected and compared to a more traditional classroom-based teaching style at another local hospice.Results Feedback scores for how effectively the sessions met five learning objects were evaluated. The students who experienced the escape room and their peers who attended the other hospice classroom based teaching had a combined average score across all five learning objectives of 9.2 and 8.9 out of 10 respectively. The free text responses for the escape room were extremely positive with many stating ‘ the best placement in medical school to date.’Conclusions Escape rooms can be successfully implemented into palliative care medical education and received with great enthusiasm. Gamification allows learners to achieve their learning objectives as effectively as traditional teaching styles through a novel and memorable experience.