In the literature there is often made a plan for a staff-oriented approach in consultation psychiatry. The expectations of the non-psychiatric physicians and nurses about the psychiatric consultations are only rarely investigated. Therefore, a questionnaire was sent to all 181 clinical professors, chiefs, residents and head-nurses of the in-patient wards of our University Hospital. They were asked to judge the relevante of 19 kinds of activities of the psychiatric consultant on a three-point scale. The response rate was 81 pct. All patientoriented activities were judged to be more important than the staff-oriented activities, this being in concurrente with the findings in the few comparable American studies. No differences were found between the responses of medical versus surgical staff. The consultant's activities were valued significantly higher by the head-nurses than by the other disciplines, particularly on the surgical services. The implications of these findings for the psychiatrist's approach of patient-staff and intra-staff problems are discussed.