Abstract
BackgroundThe COVID-19 epidemic affected the career choice of healthcare professionals and students. Career choice regret of healthcare professionals and students during COVID-19 outbreak and its affected factors are largely unexplored.MethodsConvenience sample of nurses, doctors, and medical students were recruited from hospitals and universities nationwide. The data collected including demographic information, professional value before and after the COVID-19 outbreak, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, and career choice regret level by an online questionnaire. Multinominal logistic regression was employed to explore the factors associated with career choice regret.ResultsIn total, 9322 participants of convenience sampling were enrolled in, including 5786 nurses, 1664 doctors, and 1872 medical students. 6.7% participants had career choice regret. Multinominal logistic regression analysis showed, compared to participants with no regret, that as levels of psychological resilience increased, the odds of experiencing career choice regret decreased (OR = 0.95, 95% CI 0.94–0.96), while participants with lower professional value evaluation after the COVID-19 outbreak had higher probability to experience career choice regret (OR = 1.55,95% CI 1.50–1.61). Medical students were more likely to regret than nurses (OR = 1.65,95% CI 1.20–2.28), participants whose career/major choice was not their personal ideal had higher risk of experience career choice regret (OR = 1.59,95% CI 1.29–1.96), while participants who were very afraid of the coronavirus had higher risk to experience career choice regret then participants with no fear at all (OR = 2.00,95% CI 1.24–3.21).As for the medical students, results indicated that medical students major in nursing and undergraduates had higher risk to experience career choice regret compared to medical students major in clinical medicine and postgraduate (Master or PhD), with an odds ratios of 2.65(95% CI 1.56–4.49) and 6.85 (95% CI 2.48–18.91)respectively.ConclusionsA minority of healthcare professionals and medical students regretted their career choices during the COVID-19 outbreak. Enhance personal psychological resilience and professional value would helpful to reduce career choice regret among healthcare professionals and students during pandemic.
Highlights
The COVID-19 epidemic affected the career choice of healthcare professionals and students
The coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) is a severe acute respiratory infection caused by SARS-CoV-2 which is high transmission. it has spread to 200 countries and has been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO)
As of 24 November 2020, there have been more than 58 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 1385 thousand deaths, reported to WHO [1]
Summary
The COVID-19 epidemic affected the career choice of healthcare professionals and students. Career choice regret of healthcare professionals and students during COVID-19 outbreak and its affected factors are largely unexplored. With the rapid and extensive spread, doctors and nurses have been confronted with mounting challenges that they have not been faced before. They encounter work difficulties due to lack of resources and threats to the safety of their loved ones [2] and the highest risk of being infected [3]. The epidemic has increased medical students’ perceptual awareness of the high-risk characteristics of medical and health services [6]
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