Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJanuary 26, 2022
Decision Letter - Hsu-Heng Yen, Editor

PONE-D-22-02300Willingness of Advanced Cancer Patients to Receive Palliative Care and its Determinants: A Cross-sectional Study in Northern TanzaniaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Mushi,

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Hsu-Heng Yen

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Affiliation: Nursing Department, Hunan Cancer Hospital and The Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Tongzipo Road 283, Changsha 410013, Hunan Province, China”

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: Yes

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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: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: The authors conducted an interesting study. However, different kinds of terminal cancers have different outcomes. Therefore, patients had different divisions for further treatment and willing for palliative treatment. The authors should focus on specific kind of cancer. Besides, it’s necessary to consult a statistician for data analysis. Multi-variant analysis is necessary to identify the independent factors related to the willing.

Reviewer #2: Palliative care should be considered in all patient with advanced cancer patients for the better end quality of life. We suggest to design two different questionnaires and a education publication of about palliative care. One for before reading education publication and the other one after realize the goal of palliative care. How to let patient accept the palliative care is much more important to identify

who will willing to receive palliative care.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Revision 1

Specific comments and suggestions are below:

Reviewer #1: The authors conducted an interesting study. However, different kinds of terminal cancers have different outcomes. Therefore, patients had different divisions for further treatment and willing for palliative treatment. The authors should focus on specific kind of cancer. Besides, it’s necessary to consult a statistician for data analysis. Multi-variant analysis is necessary to identify the independent factors related to the willing.

Thank you this has been taken care off as per reviewer’s suggestion

Reviewer #2: Palliative care should be considered in all patient with advanced cancer patients for the better end quality of life. We suggest to design two different questionnaires and a education publication of about palliative care. One for before reading education publication and the other one after realize the goal of palliative care. How to let patient accept the palliative care is much more important to identify who will willing to receive palliative care.

Thank you for your important observations; it is true that palliative care is provided to all patients whose cancer has reached an advanced stage. As so longer are advanced disease are difficult to cure, so palliative is given with focuses to enhancing their quality of life due to terminal illnesses. However, this was a cross sectional study that was actually focused on determining magnitude of willingness due to research gap particularly at the study settings, as some patients with terminally ill can even refuse to receive palliation instead seeking help from local healers and faith (religious beliefs) yet they get more harm to their quality of life which is against the focus for palliative care as important pillar to improve the life of patients with terminally illness. The suggestions has taken into recommendations for further interventions.

We thank the reviewer for these important observations. We have responded to their queries.

Decision Letter - Hsu-Heng Yen, Editor

Willingness of Advanced Cancer Patients to Receive Palliative Care and its Determinants: A Cross-sectional Study in Northern Tanzania

PONE-D-22-02300R1

Dear Dr. Mushi,

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.

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Kind regards,

Hsu-Heng Yen

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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 #3: (No Response)

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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 #3: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #3: 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 #3: Yes

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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 #3: Yes

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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 #3: (No Response)

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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 #3: No

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Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Hsu-Heng Yen, Editor

PONE-D-22-02300R1

Willingness of Advanced Cancer Patients to Receive Palliative Care and its Determinants: A Cross-sectional Study in Northern Tanzania

Dear Dr. Mushi:

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

Dr. Hsu-Heng Yen

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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