Background: The caesarean section (CS) delivery rate is steadily increasing worldwide, including India. Identifying the proportion of women in various categories as per Robson's ten group classification system and CS rate among them is important to bring down the increasing CS rate. Methods: This retrospective study was conducted at Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), a tertiary care teaching hospital in Puducherry, South India. The data was collected for the women delivered by CS during January 2011 to December 2011 and proportions in various groups as per Robson's ten-group classification system were calculated. Results: Among a total of 1123 women delivered during study period, 367 (32.6%) delivered by CS. The CS rates among various groups varied from 100% among women with breach presentation (group 6 and group 7) and abnormal lies (group 9) to 5.9% among multiparous women with spontaneous labour having single cephalic pregnancy (group 3). Among women with precious section, CS rate was very high (89.6%). Women with previous CS (group 5) contributed maximum (40.1%) to the total number of CS. Conclusions: In the present study, all women with breech presentation and abnormal lies delivered by CS and repeat CS was the highest contributor to all CS deliveries.

No abstract

<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> Understanding of health seeking behaviour (HSB) is essential to provide need based health care services to the population. Many factors like sex, age, type of illness, access to services and perceived quality of the services, influences the health seeking behavior. This study assessed the HSB among rural population of a coastal area in Tamil Nadu.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> A community based descriptive study was done in a rural coastal area of Villupuram district in Tamil Nadu state of India. Using simple random sampling method, 559 participants were selected. A pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to collect the data. Information about socio-demographic characteristics, presence of acute or chronic illness, health care seeking behavior and reasons for non-utilization of particular health facilities etc. was obtained. Chi square test was applied to find the association of health care seeking behavior with various participant characteristics.  </p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> Among 559 study participants, majority (56.4%) visited public health care facilities for various illnesses. Almost one-third of the study participants visited the private health facilities and another 11.6 percent visited other health facilities including pharmacies. Among various causes, febrile illnesses (39.5%) and pain (20.8%) were the most common reasons for visiting a health care facility. Individual’s income was significantly associated with the HSB (p value &lt;0.05). Availability of services, free of cost was reported as most common reason for preferring to the public health facility. On other hand, private practitioners were preferred due to their better availability and quality of care.</p><strong>Conclusions:</strong> Public health care facilities were preferred by due to low cost of services and HSB varies with the type of illness and income of the individuals.

Strengthening of primary health care services and community based interventions are urgently required to improve awareness and control of NCD risk factors in this tribal district of HP.

In Himachal Pradesh, cancer cervix is a major public health problem since it ranks as the number one female cancer. A case-control study of 226 newly diagnosed, histopathologically confirmed cases of cancer cervix and equal number of matched controls was conducted at Regional Cancer Center, Himachal Pradesh during the period from July 2008 to October 2009 with the objective to study the common factors associated with cancer cervix. Univariate analysis identified 10 risk factors associated significantly with the disease. On multiple logistic regression, however, only seven risk factors were found to be associated significantly with the disease. These were: Age at birth of first child, spacing between two children, age at marriage, literacy, socioeconomic status, multiparity, and poor genital hygiene. Risk factors such as poor genital hygiene, age at birth of first child <19 years, early marriage, illiteracy, multiparity, and low socioeconomic status were highly prevalent in the study subjects and were found to be significantly associated with cancer cervix.