The utilisation of ambulatory health care services in Saudi Arabia: A quantitative analysis.

The thesis aims to investigate whether need is the major determinant of ambulatory health care utilisation for Saudi nationals in Saudi Arabia. This is done by applying multivariate analysis on the utilisation of both curative and preventive services on the data provided by the 1996 Saudi Arabia Family Health Survey. The analysis is applied within the framework of Andersen's sociobehavioural model, categorizing the factors that affect health services utilisation into predisposing, enabling and need factors. It can be concluded from the results that although need seems to be an important determinant of ambulatory health care utilisation, some of the predisposing and enabling factors were also found to affect health services utilisation, although the degree of their effect differs according to the health condition and type of services tested for. Need is dominant with regards to the utilisation of health services in response to children's diarrhoea, infants' full immunisation and attending at least one prenatal care session. But since some of the predisposing and enabling factors were found to affect health services utilisation, this highlights the importance of addressing the factors that were found to impede the utilisation at the health care system level as well as at the society level in order to achieve a more equitable health care system