The Libyan government has used oil revenues as a basis for investing in social and economic development projects. This has included considerable amounts of money being spent at all levels of administration to widen and improve Benghazi's network of public health care services to match, at least, in quantitative terms, health care provision in the developed world. Little has been published thus far about the accessibility and utilisation of health care services in Libya, despite the wide distribution of various types of health services. Thus, apart from a few studies, essential data on accessibility and patterns as well as the determinants of services utilisation are still deficient. This study aims to start address this deficiency. The main findings of this research were: 1. Respondents of both institutional and household surveys carried out in this study had in general good physical access to public services of the polyclinics. 2. The overall level of service utilisation has been increasing with time, reaching an annual consultation rate of about 4.2 visits per person per year—a high level by international standards. 3. The study indicated that a sort of variation in use of health care services still exists, connected mainly with variations in the level, nature and type of sickness, distance travelled to reach polyclinics, demographic variables and socio—economic factors. 4. Five major groupings of disease were identified for which polyclinics were preferred: internal diseases and disease of the digestive system, cold, sense organs, skin diseases, and respiratory conditions. 5. Satisfaction with care was predicted best by four variables, staff behaviour, availability of drugs, free choice of preferred doctors and availability of parking facilities around each polyclinic (Tested by two statistical measures, namely Chi— square and Kruskal—Wallis tests). The potential implications of the findings of this study are strongly consistent with the planning notion of providing central primary care services such as polyclinics into communities or neighbourhood centres.