[Contemporary organization and necessary scope of community social psychiatric service (exemplified by North Rhine Westphalia)].

A model programme on psychiatric care had been carried out and evaluated in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1985 (the year of its completion) and was based on the (then assumed) existence of public sociopsychiatric services as one of the (meanwhile self-understood) corner-stones of communal care for psychiatric patients. Now that evaluation has been accomplished, it is high time to initiate the requisite legal and administrative steps to ensure the setting up and operation of a sociopsychiatric service for every township governed by a council and for every county, to fulfil tasks to be laid down in a law to govern the care for psychiatric patients--a service that was not originally provided for in North Rhine Westphalia by the forerunner law of a Federal German law that is still in the drafting stage, the North Rhine Westphalian model having been conceived 20 years ago. The author describes the generally acknowledged catalogue of basic tasks and the minimum demands that are to be made on a community-based sociopsychiatric service as derived from many years of experience with a variety of models, as well as the resulting personal, organizational and legal consequences. The possibility of translating these tasks into financial reality and integrating them in the routine work of an administrative township or county council, is discussed. Apart from this, future aims are shown, delineated against the present background.