Palliative care stay room – designing, testing and evaluating a gamified social intervention to enhance palliative care awareness

INTRODUCTION: The message of palliative care can be promoted using creative thinking and gamification. It can be an innovative strategy to promote changes in behaviour, promote thinking, and work on skills such as empathy. AIM: Design, test and evaluate a gamified social intervention to enhance palliative care awareness among young university students from non-health background. METHODS: Participatory action research study with mixed methods, Design Thinking and using the Public Engagement strategy. Forty-three undergraduate students participated in a Palliative Care Stay Room and completed the Test of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (TECA) before and after the game. At the end of the game, a ten-minute debriefing was held with the participants, which was concluded with an open conversation. The content analysis was done independently and the sum of the scores of each dimension was compared before and after the activity. FINDINGS: The Stay Room improved the participants’ knowledge and new perspectives about palliative care. Before the game, their views focused on the end of life and after the game on their values, highlighting the dedication of the healthcare professionals who do not treat death but the life until death. After de game, participants (N = 43: female = 23; male = 20; x̄ 19.6 years old) presented higher values in perspective adoption (intellectual ability to put oneself in the other’s place) p = 0.046 and in emotional understanding (ability to recognize emotional states) p = 0.018, and had high scores on empathic joy (p = 0.08). CONCLUSION: Gamification can be used in teaching and transmitting positive attitudes. Palliative Care and can help young university students to think positively about care issues. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12904-023-01166-9.