PONE-D-24-53011Challenges and opportunities for integrating biomedical care with traditional healing for mental illness: A scoping review from healers’ perspectivesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr.  Wollie,

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Godwin Upoki Anywar, BSc, Msc, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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: N/A

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: No

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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: Yes

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 conclusion in the abstract is a bit confusing. Here you are integrating people (traditional healers) with biomedical approaches. Is this real? Why not integrate healers practices with biomedical approaches?

Background: Traditional healing is defined in a very narrow way by only one reference. I suggest you get more references that may define traditional healing more broadly.

Look at the comments on the few following highlights in the manuscript for your reflection

Otherwise, I have enjoyed reading the outcome of the manuscript.

Reviewer #2: Title - Integrating Biomedical Care with Traditional Healing vs Integrating Traditional Treatment Approaches with Biomedical Treatment, which sounds and is described differently in the document. Does it have differences? In addition, integration and collaboration terms are different in health systems, therefore, it needs operation definition in this research.

Background:

- it is good to add existing evidence related to integrated services effectiveness, the challenges and its opportunities and consider the word limit of the journal. as, there is no compiled evidence on the challenges and opportunities related to integrating traditional healing practices with modern mental health care from the healers’ perspectives. This statement seems very general as the evidence which may be not adequate and your research gap filling should be clearly addressed.

- Do you think the global context has similar integration challenges and opportunities? I recommend addressing this issue in different context such as European context, Asian , Africa etc as background content . then, it can be help during the discussion and thematic result writing process.

Methodology:

- What was the reason for the search was limited to January 2014 and June 30, 2024?

- Was the list of synonyms or alternative terms developed for the initial keywords for the search strategy?

- Was it done manually? After removing duplicates and filtering important articles, the data were extracted using the prepared data extraction form

- Would describe clearly about thematizing process including the coding process example was it deductive or inductive, was it coded only by one person? Use reference for the thematic analysis as there are different steps and guides of thematic framework analysis.

- Do you use any tool to assure the quality of the included articles?

- Describe the analysis process to assure the trustworthiness meaning the validity of quality of the research data. Example, good to include the annex of Nvivo exported codes indexation and make clear if the coding process was done by independent reviewers.

Result:

- Under the review of studies. It is described that three review articles are included. It is not clear that if all articles are included in your study, why the existing review studies included that means the single articles finding extracted data, again be extracted their finding indirectly from the other reviews citation(if included). In addition, if that is the case, the main significance of this review in comparison to previously published reviews needs to be clearly justified. Could you elaborate on this point to clarify the unique contribution and added value of your review?

- Attitude challenges related to health professionals …“Emenet,” what is does mean ?

- Attitude challenges related to health professionals line 20 - biomedical staff Vs , under Attitudinal challenges of healers line 2 - western practitioners ….. would you make it consistent through all the documents in using such terms?

- The result writing flows to make it easy for readers, I prefer to make it starting from developed to developing or something else flow. some paragraphs start to state the result findings from Africa to UAE and then to Africa. if the statements are not interconnected, I prefer stating the findings with similar contexts.

- Attitudes of service users, line 2 - Some patients and caregivers are reluctant…. Are studies among such participants (patients and caregivers) included in your review?

- Policy issues – references to the articles are not included.

Discussion

- The repetition of similar subtopics in the result and in the discussion including repeating results of some paragraphs in the discussion are already in the way they are written in the result … this makes it boring for readers and better to consider a revision.

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Reviewer #1: Yes:  Yahaya Hills Kagali Sekagya

Reviewer #2: No

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Submitted filename: 20250226 PONE-D-24-53011_reviewer Shy.pdf

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Submitted filename: review comments.docx

Challenges and opportunities for integrating traditional healing approaches with biomedical care for mental illness: A scoping review from healers’ perspectives

PONE-D-24-53011R1

Dear Dr. Wollie,

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,

Godwin Upoki Anywar, BSc, Msc, PhD

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 #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: (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 #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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 #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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 #1: Yes

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 #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: The comments have been well addressed. However, I recommended adding the exported codes from the NVivo software as an annex or supplementary document to the manuscript, but they have still not been included. Therefore, even though Figure 2 provides a summary of the subthemes, I prefer also that you have to include the exported codebook summary of the indexed data from the NVivo software to be sent to us for review before recommending for publication.

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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 #1: Yes:  Dr. Yahaya Hills Kagali Sekagya (MD., Ph.D.)

Reviewer #2: No

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