Post-abortion family planning (PAFP) has been proposed as a key strategy to decrease unintended pregnancy and repeat induced abortions. However, the accessibility and quality of PAFP services remain a challenge in many countries including China where more than 10 million unintended pregnancies occur each year. Most of these unwanted pregnancies end in repeated induced abortions. This paper aims...

An important challenge in software technology is the construction of infrastructures for the integration of functionality provided by multiple organizations. A promising approach is the service-oriented architecture that allows the offering of services in a uniform way and the composition of new services out of existing ones. Traditionally, this was amanual task. Recently, the automation of ser...

This work describes the solutions adopted to the problems tackled during the development of SIADEX, an intelligent planning and scheduling application where users play a central role. The system is being developed under a research contract with the Andalusian Regional Ministry of Environment (Spain) and integrates planning and scheduling techniques in a service oriented architecture devoted to ...

This paper studies a set of indicators for evaluating how the quality of a freight distribution service with time windows, which operates on a given road network to satisfy a number of requests, affects the service cost. The result of a service quality setting, expressed as the width of the time windows, has been assessed using five indicators, which are a measure of the service operating costs...

OBJECTIVE Knowledge of patients' preferences of military mental health care is required to inform service planning. The objective was to inform service planning by quantifying, and identifying predictors of, patient preferences for mental health care providers and location of facilities. METHOD Sociodemographic and service characteristics and concerns about stigma were investigated for patien...

Effective child and family centered service planning is crucial to addressing vulnerable children's needs. However, there is limited evidence about what facets of these processes improve service use and outcomes. The current study used a Poisson random effects hazard model to test correlations between fidelity to NC's Child and Family Support Team model and time to service receipt, using case m...

The design and implementation of new services is a poorly understood process. The limited prior research has been characterized by the adoption of models that fail to consider important aspects of service planning, nntably the impact that a new service may have on the existing set-vice system. This article addresses many of these deficiencies by: (a) providing an alternate conceptualization of ...

The management and predictive planning of the processes to create business services is more difficult than the planning of production processes, because services cannot be produced in stock and customers are involved in their creation. In this paper, the author proposes a method for service scheduling and optimization based on an ontology to describe business services and related concepts. The ...

Liberalization of the financial services sector has led to insurance companies functioning increasingly under competitive pressures; so companies are consequently directing their strategies towards increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty through improved service quality. The present study strives to develop a valid and reliable instrument to measure customer perceived service quality in li...