Title: Prevalence and factors associated with post-abortion contraceptive uptake at Mbagala
Hospital, Temeke, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Version: 3 Date: 19 Jul 2024
Reviewer's report:
1. Title page
• Suggested title modification to ‘The prevalence and factors associated with postabortal
contraceptive uptake in Dares Salam, Tanzania’.
• The key words are traditionally part of an abstract of an article and are usually five or more. It
should be moved to the abstract page. Suggested additional key words- Uptake, women.
2. Abstract
o In line 31, the sentence ‘after having an abortion’ should be deleted. It is only women who
had an abortion/miscarriage that receive care in a PAC Centre.
o In line 33, should read ‘----October 2020 to March 2022’.
o The conclusion & recommendation should be recapped. The authors should interpret their
contraceptive update figure and state weather it is high or low specified for study setting.
o In line 49 the sentence ‘----those who are employed’ should read ‘ those are unemployed’.
3. Introduction
# The wordings in line 57 ‘where the service can be provided’ was duplicated.
# In line 63, ‘------the Hia study conducted by Mswia 2003 estimated---’ should read ‘-----the
Hia study conducted by Mswia and colleagues estimated-----'
# In line 77, the last part of the sentence should read ‘---a trend that has not changed since the
2010 survey.’
4. Materials and Methods
In line 100, the first letter of the IRB should be in capitals ie ’ –--and Allied Sciences (MUHAS)
Institutional Review Board and- –'
In line 109-119, the details of the calculation of the sample size is not usually necessary for an
article. It should be deleted in my opinion. The authors can simply recapped their statement in
line 102/103 as ‘ A total of 234 women( calculated minimum sample size for this study including
10% attrition rate was 205) who had received -----'
The authors were rather economical with the description of their data collection tool- the
pretested questionnaire. Was the questionnaire design for the study or was it adopted from a
standardised questionnaire? Secondly, there were no briefs on the contents of the questionnaire
especially with regards to the open-ended questions.
Description of the variables in lines 128-132 is not recommended for an article. It should be
deleted.
In the data analysis segment(from line 134), the authors did not document how the data from
the open ended questions were analysed.
5. Results
# The second sentence in line 146 should read ‘ A total of fifty women----’
# In Table One (page 08-09), the authors assessed the knowledge of FP of their participants.
This was not mentioned in the methodology and how it was done. What constituted adequate
knowledge of family planning and the opposite? This is very important for the purpose of
reproducibility.
# In Figure Two (page 11), what constituted ‘Others’ was not mentioned in the narrative.
# The statements in line 176-177 should be deleted.
# In Table Two (page 12), the knowledge of chosen method was assessed and categorised into
adequate and inadequate respectively. How this was done was not documented by the authors
in the methodology (Materials and Methods).
# The last word in line 182 should be ‘demonstrated’ and not ‘demonstrates’  and in line 184
it should read ‘—between various factors( such as such as age, women's occupation, previous
history of abortion) and uptake of contraception.’
6. Discussion
# The beginning of line 211 should be ‘ In this study---’ rather than ‘in this setting---’
# In line 213, the authors contraceptive uptake figure of 76% is certainly higher than the
Ethiopian study of 61.5%. The sentence should be recapped.
# In line 252, 'other studies' should be referenced.
# The statements in line 260-266 and 271-273 are not really limitations and strength respectively.
In my opinion, one of the major limitations of the study was the omission of qualitative
component into the study ie a mixed study design should have been utilised.
# List of abbreviations and Tables & Figures are not essential for articles. They should be deleted.