Room of Horrors - Turning mistakes into learning opportunities

Here is a video of a typical session: Link

Background and objective
It is estimated that around 250,000 hospital admissions in Germany each year are attributed to medication-related preventable errors [1].
Some of these errors occur in pharmacy practice, often due to inadequate workflows, insufficient documentation, or mistakes in medication dispensing. This highlights the importance of raising pharmacy students' awareness to potential risks for patient safety in everyday pharmacy practice at an early stage during their professional education. To address this need, the “Room of Horrors” concept was implemented at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) in 2025 as part of the Clinical Pharmacy curriculum.

Methods/ Concept
The students' training takes place in a room used to simulate a community pharmacy setting. This includes a cash register system and typical pharmaceutical equipment such as medication packaging and physicians’ prescriptions to enable realistic, real-life orientied learning scenarios.
Through interactive role-play, students are exposed to potentially critical situations involving medication- and dispensing-related risks and are encouraged to collaboratively develop appropriate solutions for each scenario. This promotes critical thinking as well as observational skills, and situational awareness in relation to potential risks to patient safety.

Evaluation and Ongoing Development
Recurring evaluation and feedback sessions with participating students are used to continuously optimize the concept and adapt it to the students' competencies and learning requirements. Advanced pharmacy students support the implementation of the concept by developing case scenarios and supervising the simulation exercises. They actively contribute to the ongoing improvement and adaptation of the concept by sharing their own ideas and suggestions.

Relevance
The Room-of-Horrors concept as a simulation-based learning approach, aims to help students in recognizing and preventing potential errors in their future professional practice. This may contribute to a sustainable improvement in patient safety within the pharmacy setting.

---

1. Hecker R. et al.: Stellungnahme des APS e.V. zum Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Beschleunigung der Digitalisierung des Gesundheitswesens (DigitalGesetz – DigiG) und Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur verbesserten Nutzung von Gesundheitsdaten (Gesundheitsdatennutzungsgesetz – GDNG). Berlin, 13.11.2023.