Particularly since 1995, day care hospitals developed into an important element of mental health services in the Free State of Saxony. Results from a land-wide survey (using a structured questionnaire with 57 items) in 2001 demonstrate that these services meanwhile conceptualise themselves mainly as an alternative to inpatient psychiatric/psychotherapeutic treatment and as a specific psychotherapeutic setting. Within a broad range of mental disorders, day care hospitals focus on the treatment of affective, schizophrenic, anxiety and personality disorders. Therapeutic programs are characterized by a variety of methods and contents, especially established as group treatments with an emphasis on vocational, psychotherapeutic, psychoeducational and socio-communicative elements. The administrative conditions do not differ for the Saxonian psychiatric day care hospitals, since they are defined by the health insurance companies and by the carriers of the institutions. However, with regard to the therapeutically most important qualifications, there is a significant variation concerning the number of jobs between the services. For the future development of day care hospitals it is necessary to relieve deficits in treatment offers for individual patients resulting from these differences in staff, to establish rehabilitative vocational training as well as diagnostic procedures oriented at comorbidities concerning somatic and mental disorders. This should further increase the importance of these services which are currently well integrated into regional community-oriented mental health service systems.