The Effect of Nursing Students' Self-Efficacy on Patient-Centered Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Mediating Effect of Learning Burnout

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.