Service Uptake Challenges Experienced by Pasifika Communities during COVID-19 Lockdowns in New Zealand

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Summary: the reports describes the content of a pilot survey administered through email to Pasifika in New Zealand to begin a study of lockdown consequences amongst that economically disadvantaged population. It presents 87 responses and finds that perceived availability of services, threat of infection, and cot of services were frequently identified barriers to physical and mental health care. It posits that the cultural grieving and support practices of Pasifika were especially disrupted by lockdown policies.

 

Critique

Line 59: “While lockdown was a necessary elimination strategy” is overstating the situation. As with any medical or public health intervention, there are trade-offs with a lockdown, and it is the duty of the decision maker(s) to honestly and thoroughly weigh the harms and benefits of alternative policies community by community, or of prescriptions person by person. The harms described in this report should have been anticipated at least in part and monitored in real time, and must be anticipated in any future response to pandemics or other public health threats. 

Line 93, “Convenience sampling” is a generous description of the recruitment process. People recruited through emails to “established Pacific community networks” have considerable chance of being skewed due to whatever features of these networks attracted or failed to attract the attention of prospective network members when said networks were forming. Further skewing due to pandemic experiences is likely as well (e.g. 80% with decreased income). In section 3.1, the 87+17=104 total responses looks pretty muted. Probably there is some record of how many unique email addresses received invitations, or of the membership of the different networks. A response rate would be appropriate to include. One way to bolster the results might be to compare the results of this small survey against larger official assessments, like government reports on job loss or income decline by ethnicity across the whole population. Before drawing any conclusions from a small survey, it would be nice to have some confidence that the respondents are representative of the Pasifika population. At the very, very least, the report should include the Pasifika population demographics for comparison with the survey respondent demographics. 

For future reference, section 3.2 would be far stronger if the participants had also indicated whether they would have liked to access physical or mental health services. I expect that the “no barrier” response includes people who did not feel any need to access those services, unless there was some other response that is not yet described in the manuscript, like “did not need this service.” 

In table 1, the response options should wrap to align with the first character of the response option rather than the number of the response option. 

In table 1, the last response option item in each of the first three categories has an extra trailing close parenthesis symbol “)”.

Line 145, “during to the” should be “during the”

Line 232 (out of 256 total), the word “exploratory” is used for the first time, and on line 240 a conceptual framework is presented for the first time. It is not clear whether the framework helped guide the survey development or was discovered post hoc and used to organize the findings. The manuscript could explain at the end of the introduction that this is a pilot study, and in the methods – if true – how the framework identified late in the manuscript helped guide the survey, and why some dimensions and abilities were omitted from the survey.

Author Response

Please see response attached.  

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper concerns difficulties in using services experienced by Pacifika communities during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. It is another paper in a long series of publications about an infuence of the pandemic on selected social, ethnic or professional groups in various countries. The Authors of the paper asked members of the investigated community about barriers to services, employment, psychosocial impacts and preparedness. The collected answers were analyzed using basic methods of descriptive sttistics. The number of participants was low, i.e., 87 people. In my opinion the obtained results seem to be not very revealing and more advanced statistical analysys would be necessary to get more interesting conclusions.

Author Response

Please see response.  

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In the corrected version of the paper the Authors provided some additional information. Among others, they clearly explained that the paper is a kind of preliminary study. I'm still not convinced that the paper provides very interesting new information but if publishing such preliminary studies agrees with the policy of the journal, I could recommend the paper to be published.