Nursing professional development practitioners (NPD) know how important creativity is to engaging students and staff. Of my NPD strengths, creativity is not one of them. Therefore, it is extremely valuable to be able to phone a friend and develop a strong network of NPD practitioners with different strengths to gain expertise. For me, this was possible through networking with peer members of the Association for Nursing Professional Development and through participating in my own professional growth.

In 2024, I attended the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) Magnet Conference^® and participated in a session led by Danielle Hagedorn, MBA, BSN, RN, CPHQ, and Nicole Westensee, MSN, RN, ATC, SCRN. They shared how they used a "Clue"-style game to increase knowledge about strokes and stroke mimics. They did an amazing amount of work, and their creativity was impressive. The best part was that they shared the work they had done. When there is a knowledge, skills, attitudes, or judgment gap in your own NPD practice, looking to experts via literature, presentations, webinars, or even through networking can be extremely valuable to gain insight and to develop a roadmap to navigating your challenge. However, it’s important to remember that it is not enough to simply take what someone else developed and put it out to our local learners. We must use our individual NPD judgment to adapt it to fit the specific needs of our learners. Reviewing the game, I quickly realized that it could be adapted to fit a smaller facility like my organization and the modality could pertain to a wide variety of educational opportunities.

In my role, I am one of the NPD’s assigned to a small facility in a centralized education department. Working with the other practitioners and the nurse managers we realized that many of the requests for annual skill reviews overlapped and could be used for a centralized skills fair rather than trying to build separate competency evaluations for each unit. Through collaboration with my fellow practitioners, I realized we could adapt the "Clue"-style game to make the skills fair, both fun and meaningful.

To create a "Clue"-style game that incorporates competencies, I started with the skills the nurse managers wanted the staff to review. It works best if there are at least six different stations/rooms. For our local "Clue"-style game, the skills were: chest tube management, emergency management response, double check of blood administration, proper use and functions of the X-series defibrillator, fall risks, and annual glucometer check-off. We had a large training room with accordion style dividers to break the room up into 4 separate areas, then also used the education and an executive office for the last rooms. Each room is labeled as a room from the mansion and each participant is given a tracking card so they can keep track of what to eliminate as they move through the skill stations, and while the staff had been informed of which skills would be evaluated, they did not know which skill was located in each room.

Lounge	Candlestick	Nurse manager
Billiards Room	Rope	Director
Hall	Revolver	Patient Advocate
Conservatory	Wrench	Canteen worker
Study	Dagger	Nurse Educator
Library	Lead Pipe	Volunteer

When they complete a skill station, the moderator of that station will show them a card that will list two or three items/names to eliminate, so that by the time they complete the last station they will know who was killed, where they died and with what.

We also created another set of cards (left) that listed the rooms in different random orders. When participants first arrived at the skills fair, they would be presented with the elimination card and a skills order sheet. They would use the order card to tell them about the order in which they would go to each room. Doing this would mean they would complete different skills with different people, ensuring they practiced teamwork and communication with staff other than their friends.

Takeaways for Future Games

There were just a couple of hiccups we experienced in our first "Clue"-style game. The first was getting staff to come to the training. The second hurdle was too many people waiting for a particular room because the competency took a little longer than some of the other rooms. To overcome the snags, we coordinated with the nurse managers to schedule the staff time to be off the unit for competency training in increments of 40 minutes. This allowed us to control the flow of the staff through the competencies without a significant amount of downtime. We also instituted a buzzer that would sound when it was time to change stations to ensure that we maintained only two staff members in each competency room at any given time.

Thinking Outside the Box

For most of my life, I have been an inside-the-box thinker, but since my membership in ANPD and ANCC, I have found that it is okay to start coloring outside the lines. Once I found others who were willing to share their creative ideas, I found that I could use them to make my own facility program better and more engaging for the staff. This process has also inspired me to start looking at other games that would lend themselves to training opportunities.

Think about using some of these games in your own practice: Payday, Life, Candy Land, Guess Who, or even something as simple as Tic, Tac, Toe can inspire a little competition and ultimately fun and learning. But don’t limit yourself to games that are already out there—get creative and try something new.