Are Organizational Interventions Effective in Protecting Healthcare Worker Mental Health during Epidemics/Pandemics? A Systematic Literature Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper. I found the paper focused on a very relevant topic and was very well written. I review quite a few manuscripts and this is one of the best I have seen as a first draft.

The flow of the manuscript is terms of presenting the rationale and background is clear and helpful to set the stage. Definitions for terms are included. The methods are clearly described as are the extensive results. As a reader it was easy to follow and to see how the authors reached the conclusion they presented. I think the discussion raised some interesting observations and certainly helped to project the state of the field currently.  

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the positive comments on our manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is a systematic literature review on the effectiveness of organizational interventions targeting mental health of the healthcare workers during uncertain times, such as pandemics. While mental health problems exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic and healthcare workers seem to be one of the most vulnerable groups it is essential to address this issue and answer with targeted intervention. This literature review not only helps to identify the latter but also provides an insight into its effectiveness and some other aspect, important for proper response and intervention design. The manuscript provides theoretical as well practical implications and its relevance is therefore high, especially now when the world is facing the coronavirus pandemic. The authors have made a great work by reviewing the literature in this field. Paper is solid, well-structured and clearly written, however, two suggestions for improvement are listed below.  

Suggestions for improvement:

- I suggest using term pandemics instead of epidemics over the whole manuscript, while the whole world is facing the same problem.

- The new PRISMA protocol was launched. Check the https://prisma-statement.org for the latest version.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his positive feedback and constructive suggestions.

Response to comment #1:

In response to the reviewer’s first suggestion, we are concerned that using only the term pandemic does not reflect that we also sought studies on other outbreaks that became epidemics but did not necessarily reach pandemic status (like Zika or Ebola Virus Disease and MERS). This is the reason that the expressions “epidemic/pandemic” and “epidemic or pandemic context” had been generally used throughout our paper. For consistency, we have amended the title to include the term pandemic.

Response to comment #2:

In response to the second comment, we believe that the reviewer is referring to the updated 2020 PRISMA statement since our paper is not a review protocol. We indeed used the 2020 PRISMA checklist, which was included with our original submission. However, we have now updated reference #30 in our reference list so that it refers to Page et al., 2021 (2020 PRISMA statement) rather than Moher et al., 2009 (original PRISMA statement). We have also added a note to Table A1 in the Appendix, with regards to the recommendation in the PRISMA 2020 statement that search strategies for all databases be provided (see lines 445-447 of the revised manuscript).

We hope that we have adequately addressed the reviewer's comments.