ABSTRACT
Background: The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has put the global health system under the spotlight. As part of the medical workforce, nurses play an important role in interacting with and caring for patients; hence, patient-centered communication (PCC) has been emphasized in nursing education. Thus, it is worth investigating how future nurses perceive PCC and PCC-related factors under the special circumstances of COVID-19. For this purpose, the present study analyzed the mechanisms underlying the association between self-efficacy and nurse-patient communication tendency through learning burnout among nursing students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: The general self-efficacy questionnaire, college students' learning burnout scale, and doctor-patient communication tendency scale were used to survey 2,231 nursing students in higher vocational medical colleges at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: General self-efficacy can directly negatively correlate with the degree of nursing students' overall nurse-patient communication, including caring, sharing, and health promotion. Dejection from learning burnout partially mediated the relationships between self-efficacy and caring and between self-efficacy and sharing; it fully mediated the relationship between self-efficacy and health promotion. Reduced personal accomplishment partially mediated between self-efficacy and caring, while it fully mediated between self-efficacy and health promotion; however, it did not play a role in the sharing model. Conclusion: Self-efficacy influences nurse-patient communication through learning burnout. Specifically, dejection and reduced personal accomplishment-two aspects of learning burnout-may compromise nursing students' willingness to engage in PCC. Thus, the importance of PCC, especially during critical health situations such as pandemics, should be emphasized further in future nursing education.
ABSTRACT
The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic continues to unfold globally, and its negative impact on the public's mental health is starting to reveal. Serving as reserve talents for the healthcare system, medical students are not yet professionally matured enough to face one of the worst global public health crises. This may exert increased mental stress and loneliness feelings, which in turn negatively influence medical students' future career choice. To address the issue, we conducted three online survey studies investigating how the epidemic affects the mental health as well as career attitude of medical students in China during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The results revealed preliminary evidence showing that the perceived stress induced by the COVID-19 epidemic might negatively affect medical students' future career choice, and the feeling of loneliness may play a mediating role. This study invites more attention to medical students' mental health during severe public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
The outbreak and pandemic of COVID-19, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has developed into a public health emergency of international concern. The rapid and accurate detection of the virus is a critical means to prevent and control the disease. Herein, we provide a novel, rapid, and simple approach, named dual reverse transcriptional colorimetric loop-mediated isothermal amplification (dRT-cLAMP) assay, to accelerate the detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus without using expensive equipment. The result of this assay is shown by color change and is easily detected by the naked eye. To improve the detection accuracy, we included two primer sets that specifically target the viral orf1ab and N genes in the same reaction mixture. Our assay can detect the synthesized SARS-CoV-2 N and orf1ab genes at a low level of 100 copies/µL. Sequence alignment analysis of the two synthesized genes and those of 9968 published SARS-CoV-2 genomes and 17 genomes of other pathogens from the same infection site or similar symptoms as COVID-19 revealed that the primers for the dRT-cLAMP assay are highly specific. Our assay of 27 clinical samples of SARS-CoV-2 virus and 27 standard-added environmental simulation samples demonstrated that compared to the commercial kits, the consistency of the positive, negative, and probable clinical samples was 100, 92.31, and 44.44%, respectively. Moreover, our results showed that the positive, but not negative, standard-added samples displayed a naked-eye-detectable color change. Together, our results demonstrate that the dRT-cLAMP assay is a feasible detection assay for SARS-CoV-2 virus and is of great significance since rapid onsite detection of the virus is urgently needed at the ports of entry, health care centers, and for internationally traded goods.