Public Health Impact and Health System Preparedness within a Changing Climate in Bangladesh: A Scoping Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors, I have carefully read your manuscript. Please see below my comments.
* Abstract must be rewritten. It does not provide a brief background, and is currently only a summary of the results
* Climate change and weather are two different entities, despite they are linked; I suggest to clarify this in lines 40-42
* I really appreciated the explicitation of the PICO
* Lines 86-89: please do not insert URLs inline, use references
* I can not understand what authors want to say in lines 87-88 ("The exact structured search was carried out on the University of Adelaide online library")
* Line 93: please specify to which document types the search was refined to.
* Line 102 and following: I suggest to use "gather" or a synonym instead of "yield".
* Line 106: "Summary of the results" could be a more appropriate paragraph title
* Despite this is presented as a "scoping" review, actually it is a systematic review that follows the PRISMA statement (despite some details are not clear).
* Table 1 should be re-formatted. E.g., I suggest to use "First Author et al., year" to short the second column.
* All the figures are low quality (almost in the review proof file)
* In the results, please use references and not serial numbers to refer to original studies included
* The "methods" section contains also some results. This should be avoided. See paragraph 2.5: this should be part of the initial paragraph of results.
* I have some difficulties to understand, in the results section, which parts are: a) gathered from the included studies; b) taken from external literature; and c) considerations of the Authors.
* I suggest to remove Appendix B; the image quality is very low and it does not provide fundamental information for the manuscript's content
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Dear Authors, I have carefully read your manuscript. Please see below my comments.
* Abstract must be rewritten. It does not provide a brief background, and is currently only a summary of the results.
We have written the background. Background, objective and motivation for the study is included.
* Climate change and weather are two different entities, despite they are linked; I suggest to clarify this in lines 40-42
Edited. It should be ‘climate change and extremes.’
* I really appreciated the explicitation of the PICO
Thanks.
* Lines 86-89: please do not insert URLs inline, use references
URLs deleted.
* I can not understand what authors want to say in lines 87-88 ("The exact structured search was carried out on the University of Adelaide online library")
By ‘structured’ we referred to the search query that was used in the other database search. The same keywords and search query were used in University of Adelaide online library as well. We deleted the word ‘exact structured’ which might have created confusion.
* Line 93: please specify to which document types the search was refined to.
Added under article type.
* Line 102 and following: I suggest to use "gather" or a synonym instead of "yield".
Changed to gather.
* Line 106: "Summary of the results" could be a more appropriate paragraph title
Changed to Summary of the results.
* Despite this is presented as a "scoping" review, actually it is a systematic review that follows the PRISMA statement (despite some details are not clear).
We agree as the database search is quite similar in systematic review and scoping review. However, systematic review tries to be more in-depth with few literatures with appropriate statistical analysis and scoping review is broader in scope with flexibility of backward and forward searching.
* Table 1 should be re-formatted. E.g., I suggest to use "First Author et al., year" to short the second column.
Re-formatted as per suggestion.
* All the figures are low quality (almost in the review proof file)
Better quality figures included.
* In the results, please use references and not serial numbers to refer to original studies included.
Done. We have put the reference no. in the table, so that it can be easily understood which articles were selected from the database search.
* The "methods" section contains also some results. This should be avoided. See paragraph 2.5: this should be part of the initial paragraph of results.
In the ‘methods,’ section 2.5 reported an overview of the selected. Here we reported what types of articles were selected and major focus area of the articles. As per our understanding, the fifth stage of the Arksey and O’Malley’s 5-stage scoping review framework provides a conscious picture of the gathered article from the database search and so we discussed the types of articles and their focus area of discussion.
However, in the result section, we only focused on the content of the articles and topics and issues they discussed.
* I have some difficulties to understand, in the results section, which parts are: a) gathered from the included studies; b) taken from external literature; and c) considerations of the Authors.
We have now put the reference numbers for each article that was gathered from the database search in Table 1. So, it is now convenient to look up to these 28 articles. For the other articles used in these reviews, some were collected from the reference list of these 28 articles. And others were collected from as linking article on the subject matter while searching for certain issues for more updated literature. We also did google search on issues on climate change impacts and vulnerability- which was not entirely covered within the scope of the database search. However, as the write up was prepared reviewing different literatures simultaneously to enrich the content, so it is now difficult to differentiate which part was collected from which literature. It is not impossible, but will take some serious time to make the difference.
* I suggest to remove Appendix B; the image quality is very low and it does not provide fundamental information for the manuscript's content
Done.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
I congratulate the author for the paper. The theme is treated with awareness and, from a methodological point of view, it is complete.
The only suggestion is the following:
Section 4 - DISCUSSION
Your manuscript lacks discussion of findings in an international context and your efforts don't ensure that the manuscript can be appreciated by an international readership. I suggest improving the section "discussion", specifying how other countries could benefit from this research.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 2
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
I congratulate the author for the paper. The theme is treated with awareness and, from a methodological point of view, it is complete.
Thanks.
The only suggestion is the following:
Section 4 - DISCUSSION
Your manuscript lacks discussion of findings in an international context and your efforts don't ensure that the manuscript can be appreciated by an international readership. I suggest improving the section "discussion", specifying how other countries could benefit from this research.
We have added the discussion with the uniqueness of the study and how this can act as a guiding beacon for other countries to carry out such studies. We have included the important of the tool developed and how this can help other countries in assessing level of climate change integration in their health policy operational plans. We also mentioned about the key suggestion that should be relevant to other climate vulnerable countries in establishing a climate-resilient health system.
Please see 681 – 706 in the discussion section.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Overall, this is a well thought out review of the topic. I recommend acceptance after the following minor revisions: minor editing for the English language, providing more information on the 5 point scale used to rate the articles; and expanding the discussion/conclusion.
First, there are a number of sentence fragments or grammatical issues throughout- this is not a major issue and could easily be fixed in the proofing process.
Second, I am unsure of the five point scale the researcher used to assess articles. I think adding a table or an additional paragraph of narrative discussing how articles were weighted and how they scored would be beneficial.
Third, I think the author should additionally discuss how this work might be relevant to countries other than Bangladesh- what are some commonalities with other vulnerable populations? What are some key differences? What makes Bangladesh unique? Adding this discussion to the discussion or conclusion section would make the article more accessible to non-Bangladesh experts, and more likely to be read widely and cited in the broader public health and climate chance literature.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 3
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Overall, this is a well thought out review of the topic. I recommend acceptance after the following minor revisions: minor editing for the English language, providing more information on the 5 point scale used to rate the articles; and expanding the discussion/conclusion.
Thanks for the remarks. Though early in the study we tried to develop a scale to analyze the articles, but later the idea was excluded.
First, there are a number of sentence fragments or grammatical issues throughout- this is not a major issue and could easily be fixed in the proofing process.
Second, I am unsure of the five point scale the researcher used to assess articles. I think adding a table or an additional paragraph of narrative discussing how articles were weighted and how they scored would be beneficial.
As mentioned above, we tried to develop a 5-point scale to assess the quality of the article, basically the content. But, later we understood that idea requires its own stand-alone methods, which might have diverted the attention of the readers from the subject matter. Hence, we later came up with different thematic areas/ topics relevant to the research question and grouped the articles under these themes as per their content. This was a mistake on author’s part failing to delete the section from the method section.
However, we did use a ‘5-point’ scale to assess the level of climate change integration in the health sector Operational Plans (OPs), which was discussed in details in the relevant section.
Third, I think the author should additionally discuss how this work might be relevant to countries other than Bangladesh- what are some commonalities with other vulnerable populations? What are some key differences? What makes Bangladesh unique? Adding this discussion to the discussion or conclusion section would make the article more accessible to non-Bangladesh experts, and more likely to be read widely and cited in the broader public health and climate chance literature.
We have added the discussion with the uniqueness of the study and how this can act as a guiding beacon for other countries to carry out such studies. We have included the important of the tool developed and how this can help other countries in assessing level of climate change integration in their health policy operational plans. We also mentioned about the key suggestion that should be relevant to other climate vulnerable countries in establishing a climate-resilient health system.
Please see 681 – 706 in the discussion section.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The Authors proficiently addressed all the Reviewers' comments. I further suggest to re-format Table 1 (e.g. I suggest to avoid DOI and s/n columns; note that "topics" is spelled out as "topis"), but this (very small) issue should be discussed with the editorial service of MDPI and subsequently does not affect my final recommendation.
Author Response
As per Reviewer 1’s suggestion. The Table 1 has been re-formatted. The spelling of ‘topics’ has been corrected.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
