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Summaryobjective To document differences in provider behaviour between private and public providers in hospital outpatient departments, health centres and clinics in Bangkok, Thailand.

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of the evaluation will offer insights on which aspects of primary care need to be improved to achieve better health care.

Background: In Thailand, family practice was developed primarily through a small number of selfstyled family practitioners, who were dedicated to this professional field without having benefited from formal training in the specific techniques of family practice. In the context of a predominantly hospital-based health care system, much depends on their personal motivation and commitment to this area of medicine. The purpose of this paper is to compare the responsiveness, degree of patient-centredness, adequacy of therapeutic decisions and the cost of care in 37 such self-styled family practices, i.e. practices run by doctors who call themselves family practitioners, but have not been formally trained, and in 37 conventional public hospital outpatient departments (OPDs), 37 private clinics and 37 private hospital OPDs.