• New graduate nurses need to provide safe, quality care to diverse patient populations in a consistently changing health care system. Research has shown that millennial nurses struggle to stay engaged based on how they interact, learn, and communicate in educational settings.

• The literature identified a lack of engagement from the millennial generation as compared to other generations of new nursing graduates.

• The purpose of this project was to develop a curriculum change for the Vizient ® RN Residency at Southern Illinois Healthcare (SIH) to promote learning engagement for new graduate nurse residents, specifically impacting the millennial generation, through an innovative escape room exercise.

• A select group of SIH critical care nurse residents participated in an inaugural escape room exercise consisting of events that unfold from clues and events in a simulated patient environment.

• The project gathered data from the escape room implementation by incorporating a pretest/posttest, an engagement survey to identify drivers of workforce engagement including cognitive, emotional, and physical attributes, as well as, an escape room satisfaction survey to examine engagement within millennial, critical care residents.

• This project serves as a curricular model for other NPD departments and various other healthcare organizations examining integration of an innovative escape room activity to train staff. Implementation of an escape room activity demonstrated an increase in engagement from millennials which can be linked to better patient outcomes, job satisfaction, team-building, and organizational retention.