Women’s perception on rights during pregnancy and childbirth

Background: The Nigerian health system as a whole has been plagued by problems associated with the quality of service, including but not limited to unfriendly staff attitudes to patients, inadequate skills, decaying infrastructures, and chronic shortages of essential drugs. Approximately two-thirds of all Nigerian women deliver outside of health facilities and without the presence of medically skilled attendants.  The study was carried out to assess the awareness and knowledge of women regarding their rights during pregnancy and childbirth, and to explore the extent to which women’s rights were respected during pregnancy and childbirth.Methods: This descriptive study was conducted among randomly selected 140 women at Mother and Child Hospital, Akure, Ondo state, Nigeria. Data was collected with a pretested questionnaire and was analysed using Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21.Results: Findings revealed that majority (76.9%) of the women had a fair knowledge of their rights in pregnancy and childbirth, with the source of knowledge majorly from their friends. Right to information, informed consent and refusal, even distribution of healthcare services, maintenance of attainable level of health regarding proper monitoring were fairly observed by the health care providers. Right of women against verbal and physical abuse, privacy, treatment with dignity and respect were least accorded to women.Conclusions: Respective Maternity Care remains a challenge that demands policy interventions in most public health facilities to enhance positive endorsement and utilisation of maternal and health care services

Packages of Care for Epilepsy in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

In the second in a series of six articles on packages of care for mental health disorders in low- and middle-income countries, Caroline Mbuba and Charles Newton discuss treatment for epilepsy

Development of Material Selection Software for Airplane Construction

Software named CAMSPlane was developed to implement the material selection strategy for airplane structure using rule based reasoning approach. The rule-based system is flexible, powerful and more applicable for domains where the possible solutions are either unbounded or large in numbers (Sapuan, 1999). The challenge of evaluating adequate technique for selection of optimal materials was solved in respect to the available expert knowledge and experience (Adejuyigbe, 2007). The software was designed to enable material data to be accessed through graphical user interface. It consists of an inference engine and knowledge base. The software was developed using Visual Basic 6.0 programming environment; designed to be interactive, user friendly and to run on Microsoft windows environment. The developed software can be updated or edited to suit other applications