Terms of use

TrimesterCare is operated by TrimesterCare Health Technologies(“we”, “us”), a maternal and child health technology team operating in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. You can reach us at partners@trimestercare.com for general and partnership matters, and at clinical@trimestercare.com for clinical governance matters, including anything you believe the service got wrong.

TrimesterCare answers antenatal, delivery, postnatal and routine immunisation questions in Nigerian Pidgin, Hausa, Yorùbá, Igbo and English. Answers are assembled from passages retrieved out of a fixed, versioned index of published guidance — currently World Health Organization recommendations and Nigerian Federal Ministry of Health and NPHCDA documents — and are checked against a deterministic red-flag rule set before they are sent. The service also sends scheduled reminders for antenatal contacts and childhood immunisations.

The service is currently pre-pilot. It has not completed an independent clinical evaluation. Any performance figure presented on this site as a target is a target and is labelled as one.

TrimesterCare is not an emergency service. It cannot call an ambulance, alert a facility, or reach a human being on your behalf. If you or someone near you is bleeding heavily, having fits or convulsions, unconscious, or unable to breathe, go to the nearest health facility immediately. Do not wait for a reply from this service.

The service provides health information. It does not provide medical advice, does not create a doctor-patient relationship, and is not a substitute for examination, diagnosis or treatment by a qualified health worker.

• It does not diagnose. It will not name a condition that a clinician has not confirmed.
• It does not prescribe. It does not give dosages beyond those already published in the national schedule.
• It does not interpret laboratory or imaging results.
• It cannot examine you, take your blood pressure, or hear your baby’s heartbeat, and it says so in every reply.

Always consult a qualified health worker before acting on anything the service tells you, and never delay seeking care because of something you read here.

The messaging service is intended for pregnant and postpartum women, their families, and the community health workers supporting them. By messaging the service you consent to receiving replies and scheduled reminders on that number until you opt out.

If you are under 18, we ask that a parent, guardian or health worker is aware you are using the service. If you are messaging on behalf of someone else, you confirm that you have their agreement to do so.

You agree not to:

• use the service to obtain instructions for terminating a pregnancy outside the law of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, or for any other unlawful purpose;
• impersonate a health worker or a facility, or present the service’s output as a clinical opinion issued by one;
• attempt to extract, retrain on, resell or systematically scrape the guideline index, the rule set or the response templates;
• probe, overload, or attempt to bypass the safety layers, other than through the demonstration console published on this site, which exists precisely to be probed;
• submit another person’s health information without their knowledge.

We take a specific, narrow position on accuracy: the service is constrained to relay retrieved guidance, and to refuse when retrieval finds nothing above threshold. That constraint reduces fabrication; it does not eliminate error.

Known limitations, stated rather than buried:

• Guidance is general population guidance. It is not tailored to your history, your medications, or a complication a clinician has already identified.
• Symptom extraction from free text can miss a danger sign that is described in words the lexicon does not yet hold.
• Gestational age is only as good as the number you or a health worker gave us. A wrong week shifts every reminder and can filter a rule out of range.
• Translated strings are reviewed by native speakers, but nuance is lost in every translation, in both directions.
• The guideline index is versioned and dated. Guidance changes, and a reply reflects the index version current when it was sent.

We aim to keep the service available continuously, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted availability. Delivery depends on WhatsApp, on mobile network operators, and on your own connectivity, none of which we control. Undelivered WhatsApp messages are retried over SMS where a fallback is configured. Never treat silence from the service as reassurance.

The published channel identifiers on this site are illustrative while the service is pre-pilot: +234 800 000 0000 and short code 40404 are placeholders, not live lines. The console on the home page runs entirely in your browser.

We do not charge mothers to use the service. Your mobile network operator may charge you for data or for SMS messages at their standard rates, and those charges are between you and them. Reply STOP at any time to end reminders, or LATER to defer a single visit reminder.

The software, interface, rule set, response templates and this website are ours. Clinical content is reproduced from World Health Organization and Federal Ministry of Health publications under their respective terms, and remains the property of those bodies. Nothing here transfers rights in either to you.

You may quote and cite the site’s published safety documentation for research, journalism, procurement or academic purposes with attribution.

WhatsApp is provided by Meta Platforms and is governed by their own terms and privacy policy. SMS delivery is provided by licensed aggregators and mobile network operators. We are not responsible for those services, for their retention of message metadata, or for their availability.

To the fullest extent permitted by Nigerian law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from use of the service, nor for loss arising from your reliance on general health information in place of examination by a health worker, nor for failures of network delivery outside our control.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited under Nigerian law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud.

You can stop at any time: reply STOP to end reminders, or DELETE to request erasure of your record. We may suspend access to the messaging service where use breaches clause 06, or where continued use would put a person at risk — for example repeated automated probing of the escalation path from a live mother-facing number.

We may update these terms as the service moves from pre-pilot into a supervised pilot. The version date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. Material changes affecting mothers already enrolled will be announced on the channel they use before they take effect.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and the Nigerian courts have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

General and partnership: partners@trimestercare.com
Clinical governance and incident reports: clinical@trimestercare.com
Data protection: privacy@trimestercare.com

If you believe the service gave unsafe guidance, write to the clinical address with the date, the channel, and as much of the message as you still have. Every reply is reproducible from the index version and the rules that fired, and we will tell you what we find.