DENVER — Nurses at Denver Health are learning about their workplace and best practices in nursing through a unique virtual escape room.
David Mulkey, a quality research nurse at Denver Health, said gaming is now being used in more clinical setting for continuing education, onboarding and training for nurses.
Denver Health professional development specialist Jennifer Bonn helped design the program for National Nurses Week in May. The setting for the game is New Year’s Eve 1999, when the Y2K bug had everyone, including hospitals, wondering how their systems would respond.
Bonn chose items from the 90s as clues for the game.
“An old Mac computer, a discman, a trapper keeper. I was trying to think of things I had in school at the time,” Bonn said.
The simulation requires the player to find the items from the 90s, click on them, then answer a question. Denver Health operating room nurse Natalie Tybor said she loves games and puzzles, so she jumped on board.
“It just sounded fun, and you don’t see a lot of that in my job,” Tybor said.
She said during the last year, nursing became even more stressful. The game gave the team at Denver Health a chance to do something fun together.
Through answering the questions, players also learned that Denver Health is performing better than average on key nursing quality indicators.
“I think we were in survival mode (during the pandemic) and you can’t sit back and enjoy what you’ve done until you’ve seen what you’ve done,” Tybor said.
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