Dear Editor,
We thank Mousumi Saha and Subhasish Chatterjee for their insightful comments and constructive suggestions.
The study aimed to determine the characteristics of physiotherapy practice and critical barriers toward applying physiotherapy in intensive care units. Since the purpose was collecting information about the applications of physiotherapy, while considering the perspective of the physiotherapists working in intensive care units, “intensive care units” was an appropriate word to be used as a keyword. Since the study has been already published, and critical care and intensive care could be used interchangeably, we were unable to change the keyword at this point.
As stated in the methods section, the survey was e-mailed to potential participants and physiotherapists, whose e-mail addresses were acquired from the Turkish Physiotherapy Association database.
We used this survey to collect information about the practice. However, it has not been psychometrically validated since it was not a scale or questionnaire. It is a common approach to collect information if a face-to-face semi-structured interview is not possible or preferred due to geographical difficulties.
As mentioned in Statistical Analysis of the manuscript descriptive statistics, we calculated the mean±SD, frequencies, and percentages. The open-ended questions were analyzed by two independent assessors who analyzed the responses for the content analysis, the results were clustered and the themes were produced. The inter-rater reliability of the coders was 0.90.
Sincerely,