A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer s. You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled '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.
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 If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references.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. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.
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 your Methods section, please provide additional information about the participant recruitment method and the demographic details of your participants. Please ensure you have provided sufficient details to replicate the analyses such as:. In the Methods, please clarify that participants provided oral consent. Please also state in the Methods:. You indicated that you had ethical approval for your study. In your Methods section, please ensure you have also stated whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians of the minors included in the study or whether the research ethics committee or IRB specifically waived the need for their consent.
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. 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. 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. 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, characters. Reviewer 1: This is a well-written manuscript, describing an effective initiative that was evaluated through a methodologically sound process.
It should be published. However, there are some elements that require clarification. How many churches were considered initially? What exclusion criteria were utilized to the this number down to the 80 eventually chosen? How large were these congregations? Were they all Roman Catholic parishes and if so, it would be helpful to note whether plans are underway to expand this to non-Catholic Christian communities when noting that such plans are underway to expand to Muslim communities.
Some discussion on considerations regarding this possibility would be helpful if you did indeed consider it. Shouldn't it be placed ahead of "Data collection and management? As is, your discussion of the 51 who did not follow up doesn't distinguish between those newly diagnosed and those already aware of their HIV status. The participation rate among men was far lower in your program in Benue State than that of men in the trial. Do you have any data as to why this is so or do you have any assumptions even if not verified with data that you could include in a discussion as to possible reasons for this discrepancy?
Can you discuss how you intend to address this in subsequent baby shower programs? I was glad to see the authors acknowledge this themselves and note that the results from the baby shower programs was significantly higher than those from other community based programs p. I believe you need to highlight this more clearly and earlier in your manuscript. Clearly lay out that you comparison is indeed looking at cohorts from two very different settings one clinical and one community-based.
Explain why you are making this comparison I assume you don't have access to the data from similar community initiatives-- if you can access these data, I would include you to include a discussion comparing your program to those in other community settings , and highlight the outcomes from your program which are impressive as reported as yielding comparable results as those from a clinical setting.
In short, please describe the issue of the differences in setting and how your program yielded outcomes that were nonetheless comparable to those from a clinical program. Reviewer 2: I find this a very interesting research project which is written up clearly in this article.
I recommend the authors look at my work on this in South Africa and browse the references for other material. DOI: Though this is a qualitative study, I believe it will be useful in framing why religious leaders carry so much sway in HIV education, testing, and advocacy.
Other than that, it is a convincing and clear article which nicely captures an interesting PEPFAR-funded research project.
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. 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. 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.
To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. We greatly appreciate your comments. We have revised the manuscript and provided responses to each of the points below. To the best of our knowledge, the reference list is complete and current.
We added an additional reference as suggested by Reviewer 2, noted below. The Baby Shower questionnaires have been added as Supporting Information 2 and referenced in the Methods. Thank you for noting the need for additional information on recruitment and eligibility. This was added to the Methods section.
A statement noting that participants in congregational sites are not necessarily representative of a larger population was noted as a limitation in the Discussion section line Following oral consent, participants were entered in a participant log and assigned a Member ID that was used on all subsequent documentation see Supplemental Information 2.
Written consent forms were kept in a locked cabinet in a study office in Enugu, Nigeria. While baby showers receptions held in honour of a pregnant woman where she plays pregnancy-related games and receives gifts from friends, usually, items she would need during delivery or immediately after birth occur commonly in Nigeria, church-organized group baby showers are not typical. Adapting the personal baby shower to a church-based group event that incorporates health screenings and HIV testing is part of the innovation of this approach.
To clarify this point, we altered the description of the Baby Shower intervention in the introduction section line 72 to state:. Thanks for these questions. We added to the Methods section that churches were evaluated, and of these, 80 churches were selected as well-suited for Baby Showers implementation. The 21 churches that were evaluated but not selected did not meet one or more of these criteria. There were challenges around providing HIV results in a private, confidential way during a celebratory, group event.
The positive results were typically given toward the end of the event, and the church health assistants CHAs followed up with positive clients as noted in the paper to provide additional support and ensure linkage to treatment, since it is often hard to process the results on the first day.
We agree that it is an important point to mention, however, and we edited an existing paragraph in the discussion to include this point line :. This is not specified in author instructions, and it appears that published manuscripts from PLOS ONE include the ethics section in different parts of methods.
Because the ethical review involved all aspects of methods including data management and analysis , we included it at the end of the methods section, but are open to changing the order as preferred by the editor. Thank you for this excellent point. We would have liked to do this breakdown, but the distinction between newly diagnosed and those already aware of their HIV status was complicated.
For the new vs. However, when participants were followed up to ensure linkage to ART, we often received different information about whether they previously knew their HIV status. It was then difficult to decide which self report to use for ART linkage analysis. We alluded to this in the limitations section, but further detailed this issue with the text line :.
One possibility is that in a more routine implementation setting, without the intensive support of a RCT, there was less active recruitment of male participants. The different cultural contexts in which HBI was conducted may offer a plausible explanation. Future studies to understand the socio-cultural contexts that enhance male participation in HTS may be beneficial in designing culturally acceptable and scalable partner testing interventions.
The suggestion for further investigation into context of male participation and how to enhance male engagement has been incorporated into the discussion section line As noted in line , strengthening the role of CHAs in supporting linkage and ongoing retention is a priority for the approach moving forward.
While the data from the Baby Shower events was closely reviewed, the subsequent linkage tracking was less standardized and tools were not regularly reviewed for quality. In future programs, the linkage tracking would be reviewed with the same rigor as tools from the events. Thank you for this comment — we have tried to clarify this in the text. By comparing this intervention to the standard facility-based approach, we aimed to show that we can achieve comparable HIV testing yield to facility settings and, importantly, reach women who may be missed by health facilities.
Thank you for this suggestion. We acknowledge that the discussion of the role of faith-based organizations and churches is limited in this paper since it focuses on intervention results; however, we do plan for a more general paper on implementation lessons that will incorporate additional context about working with faith-based and church organizations. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at gro.
If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact gro. 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. University of Michigan. Report Sexual Misconduct, Discrimination and Harassment. Search for: Search. Main Menu. Detroit River narratives For a long time, the importance of the Detroit River to the history and identity of southeast Michigan has not been recognized by many area residents.
Generations connect In an effort to fight loneliness and bring generations together, U-M alum Emily Lerner founded Perfect Pair in — an organization that matches seniors at assisted living facilities with college students who have similar interests. Unseen world of microorganisms With COVID, microorganisms have dramatically migrated from natural science and medicine onto center stage in politics, history, and civil society.
Learn about weekly testing. Vaccinations All students, faculty and staff on the three U-M campuses, as well as at Michigan Medicine, are required to be vaccinated against COVID and to submit their vaccination information to the university. Learn more about vaccinations. Common first year courses have been selected to prepare students for success at university, and in a health profession if applicable. Access holds weekly Learning Labs to enhance first year courses, personal development and cultural wisdom.
UMAP is open to students choosing an academic path leading to most degrees or diplomas at the University of Manitoba. Study space is available in the Indigenous Institute of Health and Healing Ongomiizwin Education at the Bannatyne Campus, where there is also a support network. This program is for Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Information for international students who wish to study with us can be found at Intensive program packages.
Admission requirements: You must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada, and resident of Manitoba. You must qualify for regular university entrance, or as a mature student of 21 or older who is admissible to University 1.
In addition to the criteria listed above, students must be eligible for the Common First Year based on the academic offer for the year in which admission is sought. Fees: There is no fee to be part of the Access Program. University tuition and other fees still apply. Application deadline: Manitoba residents starting university this fall must apply by May 1.
The selection process: In mid-May, all completed applications are screened by a committee. Applicants who have been recommended by the committee are invited to Winnipeg for interviews.
Each applicant is interviewed by a committee who recommends those applicants suited for the program to the director.
Starting the program: The university term starts in September.
0コメント