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Hi Reader,
Three hours into the opioid REMS seminar at this year’s AANP National Conference, more than 300 nurse practitioners were asked to scan a QR code. A clinical escape room loaded on their phones.
Michele McKay wrote up the experience for the Alliance Almanac, but one outcome stood out above the rest: On first attempt, 45% of learners correctly recognized nociplastic pain. By the third attempt, 85% did. In a typical conference lecture, the 55% who missed it would have nodded along and left with the misconception intact, and nobody would have been any the wiser.
Michele’s article is the clearest public account I’ve read of the value of escape rooms as a teaching modality in CME/CE, as well as the design, testing, and outcomes process. It's worth every reading minute.
Read Michele’s article →
What an escape room actually is
Strip away the theatrics and an escape room is an application exercise. Learners enter a live or virtual environment, work through puzzles tied to clinical content inside a set time frame, and solving the puzzles ends the game. It involves time pressure, strategy, challenge, and reward.
My friend and escape room designer extraordinaire, Martha Johnson of BreakoutRN puts it plainly: escape rooms help learners apply skills and knowledge they’ve already been taught. Don’t think of an escape room only as a delivery format. It’s a safe space to practice what comes after content delivery.
Like patient cases, escape rooms that work are built on authentic clinical data, realistic documentation, and patient stories learners recognize.
Which is to say: escape rooms are built on writing.
What you’re actually writing for an escape room
Gamification formats like escape rooms need scripts, patient cases, storylines, answers to player comments and questions, and consequences. Every one of those is a writing deliverable, and none of them is actually puzzle mechanics.
If you wanted to sketch one this week, here are five things you could practice:
1. Name the decision, not the topic. Not “anticoagulation in AF.” Rather: this patient’s DOAC dose is wrong and the learner has to catch it. All other content serves this challenge.
2. Choose a scenario or context that makes the decision urgent. Night shift. A transfer arriving in twelve minutes. Make it authentic and time pressured.
3. Build the room out of real artifacts. A medication list, basic metabolic panel, a nurse’s note, a discharge summary. The clues live inside the documentation.
4. Write the lock. This is the question learners must answer to move on. Every wrong option has to be defensible from something in the room, otherwise you’re testing recall, not reasoning.
5. Write the consequence. A wrong answer sends learners back to information they skimmed and asks them to think again. This loop is where most of the learning happens.
Education providers hire writers to collaborate on escape rooms, but this craft has been not been fully documented in CME. There’s no standard brief, no template, no colleague down the hall who’s built one before. Which is exactly what a WriteCME Pro member told me this week:
“This is very timely, as I am working on my first escape room project right now.”
Although she’s working on her first escape room, she doesn’t have to figure it out alone, because that’s what we’re teaching in WriteCME Pro on September 15.
Build an escape room on September 15
Nursing CE credit available
Session runs inside WriteCME Pro. Join now for access to all our events and the on-demand library until December 31, 2026.
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September 15 · 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT / 5:00 PM BST · 60 minutes, live
Martha Johnson is teaching us to build one from scratch — turning learning objectives into a storyline and a series of puzzles a team solves together.
You don’t leave with notes about escape rooms. You leave with the start of one.
Join through December →
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Have you been handed a format you’d never written before and told to figure it out? Hit reply and tell me which one.
Warmly,
P.S. Remember to browse the WriteCME Pro toolkits sale. Each one provides the structure for a single deliverable type. Save 20% until September 13.