Acquisition of Learning and Empathy Towards Patients in Nursing Students Through Online Escape Room: An Exploratory...

Currently, there are still prejudices and negative beliefs towards people with severe mental disorder. The stigma of healthcare professionals can affect both recovery time and patients' own self-stigma. In universities, it is necessary to reduce these prejudices through training on mental health.

The purpose of this research has been to assess the use of educational escape rooms as a learning and awareness strategy on stigmatizing attitudes towards people with serious mental disorders in university students.

An online escape room has been designed whose narrative shows the daily life of a person with a serious mental illness. An exploratory qualitative study has been carried out to explore the perception of 44 university students from two Andalusian universities about this escape room.

The results of the study show that most of the interviewed students consider that the educational escape room has been a fun and motivating learning strategy, which has allowed them to learn cooperatively and empathize with the protagonist with a mental disorder.

Online escape rooms can be a useful strategy for teaching health sciences students. Considering it a fun activity, students are more participatory and engaged to the curricular content, in our case, stigmatizing attitudes towards people with serious mental disorders.