Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I Can Do: Co-designing a Service with and for People with Dementia to Engage with Volunteering

Thank you for submitting your work and providing me with the opportunity to review your work, I hope you find my comments both helpful and constructive as that is my aim.

1.1

- the beginning of this section is written as bullet points, which needs to be address to support readability

- it is unclear what you mean by 'the percentage of people with mild to moderate dementia living at home can be estimated to be proportionately higher'

- a focus on supporting people at diagnosis with dementia has begun, hopefully you return to this literature later in your paper

- references from 2001 are outdated as services and support have changed dramatically since this time

1.2 

- 'To address this lack of support for people with a recent diagnosis of dementia' - a reference is required, as previously state support has been commenced

- it is unclear what you mean by 'this research' in the first sentence

- what do you mean by 'playing'?

- some of sentences are difficult to follow, such as your sentence commencing 'Using story...'

- How do people with dementia benefit from involvement, more detail is required here

- why in the last sentence of this section do you commence writing in the first person?

1.3

- this section reads as an explanation of your methods, so unsure why it is not within your methods section

Results

3.1

- what results were 'surprising'? The list you have included does not show anything surprising, also surprising to who?

3.2

- it is unclear of the need to list all the suggestions, followed by a very long paragraph that is difficult to follow, would it not be worth adding text to each bullet point to link results and create these as paragraphs

- it is difficult to follow this section and which parts of your writing are direct quotes and which are not, please amend

Discussion

- requires further development and the removal of bullet points

Author Response

Please see attached our response to reviewers 1 & 2.

Please note, we have responded to both reviewers’ comments jointly as some of them are about the same issues. We have marked comments by reviewer 1 with ‘R1’ and comments by reviewer 2 “R2”. Reviewer comments are in bold, our answers below in plain text.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I read this paper with interest and it is a relevant and current study describing the co-design process of a service with people with dementia in 7 hybrid workshops. The objectives and methods are clear and the results are well presented. Discussion is based on the study findings and clearly summarise the changes made thanks to the co-design participation. I have some minor questions below.

Introduction

Is co-design the same as Patient (participant) and Public Involvement (PPI)? If not, how do they differ?

Could you please expand on how people with dementia could greatly benefit from being involved in the co-design process? (lines 81-82)

Methods

How did you manage the dynamic with that many people in Workshops 1 and 7? What were the challenges and benefits?

Were any of the workshops audio-recorded and transcribed, or was data captured only by note-taking by researchers?

Table 1 – it would be useful to see the participant numbers with dementia in brackets and those who were care partners.

Outcomes

What guidance were participants given about the objects? Were they predetermined somehow? 

What other knowledge, theories and therapies were used when determining the nature and aspects of the workshop and the whole co-design process with people with dementia? Some of the aspects discussed in the photos provided is similar to the Cognitive Stimulation Therapy which is widely used with people with dementia in the UK. There are several other therapies which use reminiscence and images/objects from the past as an aid for a discussion, and I was curious if the authors had considered other therapies in their research when developing methods.

A suggestion in terms of formatting is to try to make the workshops stand out from one another more by using Bold font. Also, please separate the quotes and make them all in italics so they clearly stand out from the main text. At times the info overload in paragraphs made it hard to follow the flow of the paper and breaking some of the paragraphs down into smaller chunks would improve the paper.

Author Response

Please see attached our response to reviewers 1 & 2.

Please note, we have responded to both reviewers’ comments jointly as some of them are about the same issues. We have marked comments by reviewer 1 with ‘R1’ and comments by reviewer 2 “R2”. Reviewer comments are in bold, our answers below in plain text.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for engaging in the review process, I have no further comments.

Author Response

We have proofread the entire manuscript once more to correct any typos, punctuation and issues with grammar, and to improve expression and sentence structure where necessary, and hope that this is now to your satisfaction.