The demand for adult outpatient services in the Bicol region of the Philippines.

The absence of demand analysis for primary health care services has hampered efforts to finance these services and to make them permanent parts of Third World medical systems. This paper introduces a demand model for adult outpatient services, describes the types of data required for estimating it, and presents the results of a preliminary estimation using data from a poor rural region of the Philippines. The results indicate that prices and distance are not nearly as important as determinants of demand in this sample as has usually been assumed by planners. There appears to be considerable room for full or partial financing of outpatient services from user fees.