On 15-16 May, the PRESTIGE-AF team from Imperial College London hit the road once again to bring the PRESTIGE-AF Escape Room to the European Stroke Organisation Conference (ESOC) in the magnificent city of Basel in Switzerland.
ESOC is the largest stroke conference in Europe, with over 4,500 participants from 96 countries in attendance for the 10th anniversary! The conference was an extremely exciting and pertinent setting to showcase the escape room, which has become the project’s flagship public engagement activity.
Over the course of the two-days, 8 escape room sessions were run, allowing over 45 people to try their hand at ‘escaping the clinic’ in the allocated time. The activity calls on participants to work as a team, with a strong focus on the importance of communication to solve various puzzles, crack codes and uncover hidden messages in order to find out the information required to enrol a participant onto the PRESTIGE-AF clinical trial.
The escape room has now been exhibited in many different settings from various museums (e.g. V&A, Science Museum) to science festivals and conferences across Europe. The range of audiences at these events has contributed to collecting different insights and feedback on the effectiveness of the activity. Speaking with participants at ESOC proved to be no exception, with the opportunity to have many interesting conversations about the importance of thinking outside the box when it comes to communicating research.
Thank you to everyone who popped by to try out the escape room or to ask questions about the creation of this activity! If you are interested in learning more, please do get in touch.
