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.

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.