Escape the Clinic! The PRESTIGE-AF escape room

7 November 2024

When Imperial College London wanted to raise awareness of a clinical trial investigating strokes, they developed a pop up escape room to engage with people. This case study describes an activity that surpassed expectations of its reach.

Escape the Clinic! was an engagement activity designed for PRESTIGE-AF – an EU-funded research project co-ordinated by Imperial College London. At the heart of the project, which ran from 2017-2024, was a clinical trial investigating whether intracerebral haemorrhage patients with atrial fibrillation should receive anticoagulants to prevent further strokes.

Imperial’s Research Impact Management Office (RIMO) wanted to develop an activity to engage audiences with the complex research taking place within PRESTIGE-AF, whilst raising broader awareness of stroke and atrial fibrillation.

Inspired by a pop-up escape room format used by the Research Engagement Team at Cancer Research UK, the team decided to explore whether an escape room could work for PRESTIGE-AF.

The team created the core concept of the escape room, where those participating take on the roles of clinicians working on PRESTIGE-AF who have to recruit a patient onto the clinical trial. In order to do this, the participants have to gather all the required information about the patient by searching around the room and solving puzzles that were directly inspired by PRESTIGE-AF.

Escape the Clinic! has since been run at various London institutions, international events and conferences. As of 1 October 2024, the PRESTIGE-AF Escape Room has been run at 12 events in four countries, with a total of 502 participants across all sessions.

• Impact
• public engagement