Author's response to peer reviewer's and statistician's reports

Professor Capewell's comments

1. The location of the sites and the days of the sample have been specified. Further explanation of the response rate has been given, including rates for each site. Further information has been added about age and gender.

2. The denominator has been included. 999 calls have been reported separately.

3. It is 95% but rounding errors in the table would lead you to believe it was 96%. I have not changed this. The suggested rephrasing has been undertaken.

4. The denominator has been added. Details about other comments have been added. Numbers have been removed and the text amended.

5. The word 'some' has been added.

6. The comments section has been slimmed down and the limitation of non-response addressed. We felt that we could not address the other issues in such a short paper and chose to address the non-response issue because it was picked up by two referees and we feel it is the most important issue.

7. Further research issues have been added.

8. The references are all in the 1990s and we feel they are appropriate.

9. Footnotes have been added as suggested.

10. The pages have been numbered by hand.
 

Julie Morris' comments

1. The weekdays have been specified.

2. Further details have been given about the response rate.

3. The response rates for sites have been included.

4. The other comments have been detailed.

6. 95% confidence intervals have been added to two statistics.

8. The minimum percentage of callers finding the advice helpful has been included.

Points 5 and 7 have been considered but we felt limited by the 600 words and have not included these further analyses.
 

Checklist

1. The study design has been added to the title.

2. Authorship has been specified.

3. Information on contributors has been added.

4. Source of funding and competing interests have been added.

5. The article is now 607 words long.

6. Ethics committee approval has been added.
 

A O'Cathain, Research Fellow