The problem with most intake forms
An intake form does two things at once and most templates only do one well.
It gathers what you need before a first appointment, and it sets the tone of the relationship. A form that reads like an insurance claim gets accurate answers and a cold start. A form that is all open questions is warm and tells you nothing you can act on.
The second failure is generic health screening. A single medical checklist bolted onto every treatment type is worse than useless, because the contraindications that matter for a chemical peel are not the contraindications that matter for a deep tissue massage or a botulinum toxin injection.
What we published
Four intake forms for talking therapies: counselling intake in plain client-facing language, therapy intake as a clinical document with referral, funding and dual sign-off, nutrition intake with a usual-intake table, and coaching intake with a working agreement.
Three for beauty and aesthetics: esthetician intake with a dedicated active ingredients field and a patch test record, botulinum toxin consent with a per-area treatment table capturing units and batch numbers, and tattoo consent with age verification recorded as a sighted ID rather than a tick box.
Four for fitness and bodywork: gym waiver with pre-exercise screening and a clearance process, personal training intake with injury history asked as functional consequence rather than diagnosis, and massage intake in two versions, one covering the paper workflow.
Three things we did differently
We ask about active ingredients, not products. Ask a client what skincare they use and you get "cleanser, moisturiser, serum", which is useless. Ask specifically about retinoids, acids, vitamin C and benzoyl peroxide and you get an answer that determines whether today's treatment is safe.
We record batch numbers per area. The injectables form captures product, batch, expiry, dilution and units per treatment area. If a recall happens you need to identify every patient from an affected batch, and you cannot do that from a total dose.
We ask what people have hated. The personal training intake asks what a client enjoyed and what they hated. Somebody who has hated every group class and hated running is telling you the two things most likely to make them quit, and no amount of sound programming survives that.
What is not on them
Risk assessment. There is no self-harm screen or scored instrument on any of the therapy forms, and that is deliberate. Risk assessment happens in session, with a validated tool, by someone who can respond immediately. A tick box on a waiting room form produces either a disclosure nobody is present to act on, or a false negative because ticking a box feels different from telling a person.
How to use them
Fill one online, brand it, download the finished PDF. Or take the blank PDF or Word file and print it for the clipboard. No account, no email address, no watermark.
Browse the whole set on the practitioner intake template hub.