BACKGROUND Health service providers can restrict access to contraceptives through their own imposed biases about method appropriateness. In this study, provider biases toward contraceptive service provision among urban Nigerian providers was assessed. METHODS Health providers working in health facilities, as well as pharmacists and patent medical vendors (PMV), in Abuja, Benin City, Ibadan, I...

My thesis is that practical language support can be provided for Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) for Application-Service Provision (ASP), which is better than that provided by pre-existing languages in that: it provides greater assistance in expressing conditions that mitigate the risks inherent in ASP; and disputes related to agreements expressed in this manner may be more easily resolved in s...

The urgency for service differentiation, customisation and personalisation in the market of 3G mobile services and applications has boosted the activities of many standards groups and Telecommunication companies and institutions to introduce advanced frameworks and architectures for the support of flexible service provision. Important feature in such architectures is the location information ma...

Cardiac conditions account for at least half of acute medical admissions. The provision of a comprehensive and responsive cardiological service in the UK is therefore pivotal to the manner in which the NHS continues to modernise. This article reviews recent developments in cardiology, describes the current provision of cardiac services for the more commonly encountered conditions, and explores ...

Enterprise architecture (EA) provides a blueprint of an organisation’s current and desirable future IT infrastructure, systems, data, processes and capabilities, together with a roadmap for achieving the desirable future state. Despite significant interest and investment in EA, organisations still have difficulty articulating the business benefits of EA. In this research in progress paper we co...

The client-server model continues to dominate distributed computing with increasingly more flexible variants being deployed. Many are centered on the notion of discovering services at run time and on allowing any system component to act as a service provider. The result is a growing reliance on the service registration and discovery mechanisms. This paper addresses the issue of facilitating suc...

The evolution of 3rd Generation (3G) mobile systems introduces a new era in advanced multimedia service provision to mobile users. The importance of localisation as a primary concept for service adaptability, downloadability and network reconfigurability is an aspect to be considered in the context of future mobile systems and networks enabling new approaches in service provision. The urgency f...

The evolution of mobile networks and systems to 3 generation and beyond is expected to create a telecommunication service provision model that differs considerably from existing paradigms. A new environment is envisioned, where a plethora of advanced, customisable applications, developed by multiple co-operating entities, will be ubiquitously accessible via diverse terminals and networks. In th...