Enhancing emergency competencies in healthcare professionals via murder mystery games: An innovative gamification learning-based approach

•Developed a Murder Mystery Games-based learning method for healthcare professionals to simulate emergency scenarios and enhance response capabilities.•Proposed design principles for Murder Mystery Games tailored to healthcare professionals, creating twelve emergency-themed scripts.•Designed an evaluation framework with five dimensions and nineteen indicators to comprehensively assess and validate the emergency capabilities of healthcare professionals.•Enhanced healthcare professionals' emergency response, decision-making, teamwork, and emotional support through role-playing and situational simulations. Enhancing the emergency competencies of healthcare professionals is essential for ensuring patient safety, optimizing emergency response efficiency, and fostering effective team collaboration. However, traditional simulation-based methods often struggle to accurately replicate real-life emergencies, resulting in outcomes that may not fully reflect actual performance, thereby undermining their effectiveness in training and developing the critical skills needed for emergency situations. This study evaluated the effectiveness of using murder mystery games (MMGs) as a gamified learning method to enhance the emergency competencies of healthcare professionals. Twelve scripts of emergency scenarios were developed for the MMGs, and five assessment scales were established, covering emergency response, scenario decision-making, team collaboration, emotional support, and human care. Questionnaire data were analyzed between the experimental and control groups using Chi-square tests for five dimensions and nineteen indicators of emergency competencies. The performance of the experimental group in emergency response and emotional support was significantly higher than that of the control group (P