https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5195-2376
Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionMay 10, 2020 |
|---|
|
PONE-D-20-13834 Health care seeking patterns among patients investigated for drug resistant tuberculosis in Harare, Zimbabwe: a prospective cohort study. PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Tadokera, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 11 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Nicky McCreesh Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 2. Please address the following: - Please include additional information regarding the survey or questionnaire used in the study and ensure that you have provided sufficient details that others could replicate the analyses. For instance, if you developed a questionnaire as part of this study and it is not under a copyright more restrictive than CC-BY, please include a copy, in both the original language and English, as Supporting Information. In addition, please include further details of the development and validation of this tool. - Please refer to any sample size calculations performed prior to participant recruitment. If these were not performed please justify the reasons. Please refer to our statistical reporting guidelines for assistance (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines.#loc-statistical-reporting). 3.We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially identifying or sensitive patient information) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. Please see http://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c181.long for guidelines on how to de-identify and prepare clinical data for publication. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Partly ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: I Don't Know ********** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: No ********** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Abstract Pg. 2, L25: are major impediments…… Pg. 2, L28: using s prospective cohort study design More information on data collection instruments, analysis etc. are required in the methods section Pg. 2, L33-34 should come first in the presentation of results. Pg. 2, L29: The socio-demographic characteristics of the participants is missing. It is important for the subject under study Introduction Pg. 3, L50-53: Consider making 2 sentences for better coherence Pg. 3, L53: Remove ‘due to’ Pg. 3, L54: add ‘also’ after may Pg. 3, L56: Change from…. in the community, which may TO …. in the community and this could….. MAY has been used severally in that paragraph Pg. 3, L59: add the before availability Pg. 3, L71: Study area/setting missing Pg. 4, L87-92: Consider breaking long sentences Pg. 4, L87, 96: Source of the questionnaire and definitions lacking. More information needed Results Pg. 5, L122: More information on this main study is needed in the preceding sections Table 1: Many variable son this table don’t add up to 68: e.g. age categories, occupation etc. Pg. 9, L161; This information needs to be reflected in the abstract Pg. 9, L164; Participants who did not first care at….. Pg. 9, L168: Qualitative data collection and analysis was not described in the methods, how come these results? Pg. 9, L176: Figure legend present but figure absent How does the information presented in L143 differ from L184 Pg. 9, L183: Remove space between visits and recorded Pg.9, L186: Figure legend present but figure absent Pg.9, L190: This should have been defined under methods. Pls add clinical outcomes to the definitions. How many people died or survived? Pg. 11, L212: contacted Pg.11, L233, 236 : Integrate ref 5 and 29 as one statement as both sentences refer to the same thing Pg. 12, L241: for a bedridden…. Pg. 12, L254: or by exorbitant…. L257: another recommendation could be integrating private providers in care provision given their high patronage L264; use because instead of to the extent that L271, 272: Interviews not discussed in methods section L275: self-report is another limitation L281: not discussed in the discussion, see comment above L284: We recommend the improvement of the quality of care………in order to reduce……….and ensure more prompt…………… Reviewer #2: PONE-D-20-13834 Health care seeking patterns among patients investigated for drug resistant tuberculosis in Harare, Zimbabwe: a prospective cohort study Thank you for a really interesting and important piece of work. Suggestions below are merely to help you strengthen your work and the final product. I have added comments with reference to specific sections of the work below. Abstract: Would be good if you could specify what your data source is; as well as outline your study design which I think is a mixed methods study (cross-sectional quantitative data) with qualitative interviews? General comments: Please define all abbreviations used in your manuscript. Page 3, line 64: I think you mean disability, instead of debility. Page 4, line 74: how many facilities were sampled and how were these facilities selected? Patients were interviewed at selected health facilities and identified based on the selection criteria outlined. Page 4, line 87: should read “data were collected…” Page 4, line 91: where were the other variables collected from if not directly from the patient through patient interviews? Page 5: under your statistical analysis paragraphs, it might be useful to specify different types of analyses separately. So, for example, perhaps start with describing how you would do your initial descriptive analysis where you are describing your sample. Specify if you are comparing different types of patients in your sample with one another. Then describe how you are setting up your regression analysis where you are wanting to explain your findings related to the time spent in accessing care or you are wanting to understand which variables and how they explain patient and health seeking delays. Then explain which statistical approaches you used and why. Page 5, line 106: Why did you categorise your continuous variables, was that for the initial reporting in Table 1? In your statistical analysis, it is better if you can use the continuous variables in your model. Page 5, line 124: It would be helpful if you could report not only the percentage, but to also show the numerator and denominator for the percentage reported, ex. 45% (31 /68) of participants had a history of TB. On page 6, line 126: How do you define informal employment. It is worth spelling this out a bit more for the reader. Page 6, line 128: Figure 1 is not showing up in the review document. What were the reasons for patients to not consent to the health seeking behaviour survey? How did your sample reduce from 73 following initial consent to 68 included in your analysis? Table 1: High proportion of the sample was female – why is this? Is it a possible sampling bias? What is the relevance of having been referred from outside Harare? A more detailed description of the setting and DR-TB services in Harare will be needed in your background so that this statement makes sense. Plus, you need to remember that your readers may not know what the health system in Zimbabwe is like, and how people move through care. How do they pay for care? In your introduction, it would strengthen your paper if you could share some of your knowledge of how the system works to give the reader a sense of why your research question is important and what the context is within which they need to understand the results. When you describe the delays; it would be good to first describe patient delay (as you have done), then health facility delay and then the total delay. This allows the reader to follow how you got to your total delay estimate. Do you perhaps have any data on what proportion of people first started drug-sensitive TB treatment (DS-TB) before initiating on rifampicin resistant TB treatment? Page 9, line 161: the results here sounds as if they came from open-ended questions/ or from qualitative work. If so, you need to be clear with the reader where that data came from and how it was analysed. This needs a separate section in the methods section with detailed discussion and justification of the methods used. Page 9, line 174: Figures 2 and 3 are missing. In the section “Associations with clinical outcomes” you are reporting important and interesting results. But I think this part of your analysis needs to be more clearly described in your methods section – specifically here I am referring to your comparison of costs and health seeking delays between who die and those who survive. How was this outcome (death) collected and what are the limitations of the approach used? Next, how did you set up your regression analysis and then in the results even if those results are not significant it would still be useful to know what the direction of the relationship between those variables is and even if not significant you can still report the p-value. It would strengthen your paper if you could explore what the determinants of long delays to RR-TB treatment are… for example, it might be accessing a certain facility first, or age or gender… But if you set up your regression analysis to answer this question, the answers would be very helpful to policy makers as it would allow them to construct useful and data-informed interventions. Your discussion section is great – the work is well positioned. The paper would be even stronger if you added a sentence or two on what your think the policy implications of the work are. What is your advice to the NTP, how should they use your results to improve the service? ********** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
| Revision 1 |
|
PONE-D-20-13834R1 Health care seeking patterns of rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis patients in Harare, Zimbabwe: a prospective cohort study. PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Tadokera, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by May 28 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Anna Maria Mandalakas, MD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ********** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #2: No ********** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #2: PONE-D-20-13834R1 My comments were sufficiently addressed. Additional comments, with further information: In Table 2: show days per unit of time. Patient population: Rif-resistant Page 2, from line 35: better to quote the arithmetic mean of costs (in addition to the median). Cost data are typically right skewed. The arithmetic mean is used when we estimate the total cost to a budget (mean cost x number of patients to be treated). This is a common use of health service cost data when considering policy options. A paper of interest is Thompson & Barber. 2000. How should cost data in pragmatic randomised trials be analysed? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127588/. Page 3, line 72: prospective cohort study nested in what? Page 9, line 202: would be good to specify the variables you adjusted for Page 9, line217 and page 8, line 173: costs as a percentage of annual income is shown. It would be helpful if you could also report the proportion of patients who faced catastrophic costs. This will bring your paper in line with current literature. For an overview of the topic, see http://www.stoptb.org/wg/dots_expansion/tbandpoverty/assets/documents/Tool%20to%20estimate%20Patients%27%20Costs.pdf. ********** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
| Revision 2 |
|
PONE-D-20-13834R2 Health care seeking patterns of rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis patients in Harare, Zimbabwe: a prospective cohort study. PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Tadokera, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 10 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Anna Maria Mandalakas, MD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): The team has done an excellent job with revisions. The manuscript looks quite good; I am excited to see this published. I have one small suggestion for your consideration: Line 304 (concluding paragraph): please consider revising by inserting the word 'screening' such that the revised text states "should be trained in appropriate TB screening and diagnosis, and referral of potential TB patients...." The addition of the addition of 'screening' is perhaps more appropriate for the pharmacy level of care. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
| Revision 3 |
|
Health care seeking patterns of rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis patients in Harare, Zimbabwe: a prospective cohort study. PONE-D-20-13834R3 Dear Dr. Tadokera, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Anna Maria Mandalakas, MD Guest Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: |
| Formally Accepted |
|
PONE-D-20-13834R3 Health care seeking patterns of rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis patients in Harare, Zimbabwe: a prospective cohort study. Dear Dr. Tadokera: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Professor Anna Maria Mandalakas Guest Editor PLOS ONE |
Open letter on the publication of peer review reports
PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.
We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.
Learn more at ASAPbio .