Life with an Indwelling Urinary Catheter: Experiences from Male Patients Attending the Urology Clinic at a Tertiary Hospital in Northwestern Tanzania—A Qualitative Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper.  I fully appreciate the significance of the research in a Sub-Saharan context/culture and for that reason I congratulate you for conducting research in an area of practice that is problematic.  it is one that people generally find it challenging to discuss and I suspect this is especially the case in your context.  I have some specific feedback that in my view undermines the scientific quality of the paper and means it needs a lot more work before it can be published:

1.  in terms of impact you suggest that the Tanzanian Government would take on these findings and use them to change policy - I suggest that you are over-claiming the significance of what is a very small descriptive study.  It would be unusual for such a stand-alone study to be used to change practice of itself.

2.  The title of the research is - "Life with an indwelling urinary catheter: experiences from male patients attending urology clinic at a Tertiary Hospital in Northwestern Tanzania- A qualitative study. So why did you include a female patient in your sample?  If this study was about people in general then that would be fine, but you specifically state this is about men. In your findings you don't indicate which of the quotes are from men or from the one participating woman so it is impossible to determine the significance of the findings for men.

3. you seem to be focused on older men (given that most had prostatic hypertrophy then that is a reasonable assumption to make!) but yet the age range of male participants was 22-85. This needs clarifying.

4. The themes underpinning the findings are fine.  However the discussion of the findings is inadequate from a phenomenological perspective.  The discussion reads like a generic evidence-based practice discussion and not a phenomenological one.  I see no application of phenomenology to the findings and this is a problem that has to be addressed.

Author Response

Please see the attachment it is for the response to the reviewers' comments

Thanks

Asteria

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

First of all congratulations on the study, I really enjoyed reading it.

1. Once the transcriptions of the interviews were made, were they sent to the interviewees for confirmation and validation?

2. No software such as ATLAS.ti was used in the data analysis.

3. I missed Rigor, i.e. how was the credibility of the participants and the researchers assessed, transferability, reliability and confirmability?

4.As you rightly say in the limitations, it would be interesting for the future to carry out this study in women.

Author Response

Please see the attached reviewers' comments.

Thanks

Asteria

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for replying to my feedback.  I am happy with the changes you have made and following editing of the english language the paper is suitable for publication