Background Despite nurses needing a very long time to accumulate intensive care knowledge and skills, there is a severe shortage of intensive care nurses worldwide. This study aimed to examine the effect of an escape room teaching strategy on knowledge of managing intensive patients, teamwork attitudes, satisfaction, and willingness to participate in the program among new nurses.
Methods A convenience sampling approach was utilised to enlist 84 new nurses from the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University in this quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest study. An online examination and questionnaire were used to assess new nurses' knowledge of intensive care and teamwork attitudes before and after the escape room training game, as well as to measure satisfaction and willingness to implement this training.
Results Fifteen groups of new nurses participated in the escape room training program. The mean knowledge score after the intervention significantly varied from that before the intervention (p = 0.000), and there were significant differences in the mean T-TAQ total score (p = 0.000) and in the dimensions of teamwork (p = 0.000), leadership (p = 0.000), situation monitoring (p = 0.019), mutual support (p = 0.000), and communication (p = 0.000) before and after the intervention. The new nurses were highly satisfied with the escape room training program (9.23 ± 0.869), and the majority of them (95.24%) wanted to participate in similar training.
Conclusion The implementation of the escape room has a positive impact on the promotion of acknowledged knowledge of intensive care, together with increasing teamwork attitudes, satisfaction and willingness among new nurses. Escape room training is suggested as a popular training game that can be used to attract new nurses to gain difficult knowledge of intensive care and enhance the teamwork attitude of players.