Advancing Team Cohesion: Using an Escape Room as a Novel Approach

Objective: An escape room was used to study teamwork and its determinants, which have been found to relate to the quality and safety of patient care delivery. This pilot study aimed to explore the value of an escape room as a mechanism for improving cohesion among interdisciplinary healthcare teams. Methods: This research was conducted at a nonprofit medical center in Southern California. All participants who work on a team were invited to participate. Authors employed an interrupted within-subjects design, with two pre- and post- escape room questionnaires related to two facets of group cohesion: (belonging – (PGC-B) and morale (PGC-M)). Participants rated their perceptions of group cohesion before, after, and one-month after the escape room. The main outcome measures included PGC-B/M. Results: Sixty-two teams participated (n 280 participants) of which 31 teams (50%) successfully “escaped” in the allotted 45 minutes. There was a statistically significant difference in PGC between the three time periods, F(4, 254) 24.10, p \u3c .001; Wilks’ K .725; partial g2 .275. Results indicated significantly higher scores for PGC immediately after the escape room and at the one-month follow-up compared to baseline. Conclusions: This work offers insights into the utility of using an escape room as a team building intervention in interprofessional healthcare teams. Considering the modifiability of escape rooms, they may function as valuable team building mechanisms in healthcare. More work is needed to determine how escape rooms compare to more traditional team building curriculums

It’s not just a game: A proposed method to examine the use of an escape room in team building

Countless industries rely on effective teams to function. Team processes, the mechanisms by which teams coordinate their efforts to work together, have large impacts on outcomes such as team effectiveness. To improve team processes and outcomes, organizations rely on interventions such as team building or training. Escape rooms are receiving attention as a game-based avenue to facilitate such interventions in the past five years. Escape rooms are a recreational, team-based activity wherein multiple individuals must work together to solve a series of challenges or puzzles in a limited time. Escape room team building interventions are largely nascent in the literature and their efficacy in improving team processes or outcomes is not well understood; the escape room research literature has not yet examined the sustainability of such interventions, performed comparisons between participants and non-participants, or leveraged measures of team processes. Therefore, this research aims to advance the science underlying escape rooms as a team building intervention. This research will utilize archival data from 36 teams completing an escape room team building activity at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Differences in team processes and team effectiveness based on task completion will be assessed. Behavioral indicators and perceptions of team processes will be used to examine relationships between teamwork and task completion. Additionally, this research will use prospective survey data from prior and non-prior participants at Cedars-Sinai to assess the effects of participation on perceptions of team processes and team effectiveness over time and the magnitude of such effects compared against non-participants

Advancing Team Cohesion: Using an Escape Room as a Novel Approach

Objective: An escape room was used to study teamwork and its determinants, which have been found to relate to the quality and safety of patient care delivery. This pilot study aimed to explore the value of an escape room as a mechanism for improving cohesion among interdisciplinary healthcare teams. Methods: This research was conducted at a nonprofit medical center in Southern California. All participants who work on a team were invited to participate. Authors employed an interrupted within-subjects design, with two pre- and post- escape room questionnaires related to two facets of group cohesion: (belonging – (PGC-B) and morale (PGC-M)). Participants rated their perceptions of group cohesion before, after, and one-month after the escape room. The main outcome measures included PGC-B/M. Results: Sixty-two teams participated (n 280 participants) of which 31 teams (50%) successfully “escaped” in the allotted 45 minutes. There was a statistically significant difference in PGC between the three time periods, F(4, 254) 24.10, p \u3c .001; Wilks’ K .725; partial g2 .275. Results indicated significantly higher scores for PGC immediately after the escape room and at the one-month follow-up compared to baseline. Conclusions: This work offers insights into the utility of using an escape room as a team building intervention in interprofessional healthcare teams. Considering the modifiability of escape rooms, they may function as valuable team building mechanisms in healthcare. More work is needed to determine how escape rooms compare to more traditional team building curriculums