Attitudes towards female genital cutting among pregnant women in Owo, Nigeria

Background: This study aimed to determine the attitudes of pregnant women attending the antenatal clinic at Federal Medical Centre, Owo, Ondo State, Nigeria, towards female genital cutting.Method: The study was conducted over a period of six months, between November 2010-April 2011, at the antenatal clinic of the hospital. Prior to commencement of this study, ethical clearance was obtained from the ethical review committee of the hospital. The respondents were interviewed by the authors and three trained research assistants, with the aid of aquestionnaire. The obtained data were collated and analysed with SPSS® 15.0.1 statistical software.Results: Most respondents (72; 56.3%) had undergone female genital cutting. The majority (90; 70.3%) were aware of female genital cutting. Less than half supported discontinuation of female genital cutting (63; 49.2%) and legislation against it (57; 44.9%). A quarter of respondents (33; 25.8%) would allow their daughters to undergo female genital cutting.Conclusion: The majority of the respondents had undergone female genital cutting, which was sometimes carried out by a medical practitioner. Less than half supported the discontinuation of female genital cutting and legislation against it. Medical practitioners should be prevented from performing female genital cutting

Development of a medical staff recruitment system for teaching hospitals in Nigeria

Recruitment of staff into teaching hospitals in Nigeria, acts as the first step towards creating competitive strength and strategic advantage for such institutions. However, one of the major problems associated with these institutions in the South Western part of Nigeria is their mode of staff recruitment. In this research paper, we developed a suitable staff recruitment system for some health institutions in Nigeria, focusing specifically on some teaching hospitals. Three teaching hospitals in south west Nigeria, were visited and relevant information was collated through personal interviews and questionnaires administration to the staff of Human Resource Departments and other relevant health professionals of these teaching hospitals. The design and development of the system employs 3-tier web architecture. System design of the staff recruitment system consisted of design activities that produce system specifications satisfying the functional requirements that were developed in the system analysis process. A formal model of the staff recruitment system was built using Unified Modeling Language (UML). The UML, as a modeling system, which provides a set of conventions that were used to describe the software system in terms of objects, offers diagrams that provide different perspective views of the system parts. The Web-based Medical Recruitment System (WBMRS) was designed to be user friendly and it is easy to navigate.Keywords: Staff recruitment system, teaching hospitals, health institutions, NigeriaInternational Journal of Natural and Applied Sciences, 6(1): 116-124, 201

Current cybersecurity maturity models: How effective in healthcare cloud?

This research investigates the effective assessment of healthcare cyber security maturity models for healthcare organizations actively using cloud computing. Healthcare cyber security maturity models designate a collection of capabilities expected in a healthcare organization and facilitate its ability to identify where their practices are weak or absent and where they are truly embedded. However, these assessment practices are sometimes considered not effective because sole compliance to standards does not produce objective assessment outputs, and the performance measurements of individual IS components does not depict the overall security posture of a healthcare organization. They also do not consider the effect of the characteristics of cloud computing in healthcare. This paper presents a literature review of maturity models for cloud security assessment in healthcare and argues the need for a cloud security maturity model for healthcare organizations. This review is seeking to articulate the present lack of research in this area and present relevant healthcare cloud-specific security concerns