Psychology Intake Form

What Is A Psychology Intake Form

The  is used by psychologists to onboard their clients before any therapeutic sessions. It aims to collect multiple layers of information about the clients, which helps psychologists have a more comprehensive understanding of these new clients and meet legal requirements. It gives psychologists a more holistic picture of how to approach clients, taking care of their physical, mental, and spiritual needs. It also helps psychologists take precautions for potential threats and medical events, like the onset of a seizure, syncope, maniac episode, violent tendency, etc.

An intake form template is a predesigned, customizable document utilized to gather crucial information about a new client or patient before service provision. In essence, A generic psychology intake form mainly consists of 4 sections, client information, social history, medical and psychiatric history, and basic mental health assessment. The client information aims to collect credentials and emergency contact to meet legal requirements and identification purposes. The social history aims to understand clients’ social background, gaining a deeper level of interpretation and empathy of clients’ situations. The medical and psychiatric history helps the psychologists to be aware of any underlying medical condition or mental illnesses that are associated with the symptoms, like Alzheimer’s, MDD, etc. The mental health assessment aims to get a rough outline of how clients are navigating through their life at the moment and their thoughts about the upcoming sessions.

How To Use This Template For Psychology Intake Form

Our psychology intake form template is designed to maximize compatibility and accessibility. To use this template, just follow these simple steps:

Step One: Download the PDF

Download our fillable pdf template, and you can either choose to fill it out straightaway digitally or have it printed out. Alternatively, you can also access this template from the Carepatron template library.

Step Two: Deliver to Clients

The nature of the psychology intake form is to collect information from your clients. Therefore, the form should be initially completed by the patient at their best capacity, so make sure you are delivering the form to your clients either digitally or printed out.

Step Three: Check for Full Completion

The content of the form is substantial, so your clients might get skip some fields by accident. Make sure you check the forms after they are sent back to confirm that all the important fields are filled out. Remind your clients to fill in the missing sections of the form.

Step Four: Storage and Documentation

After everything is completed, make sure you document your clients' intake forms in their corresponding folders. The information inside the intake form is also strictly confidential, so make sure they are stored securely as well.

Who Can Use this Printable Psychology Intake Form (PDF)?

A psychology intake form is mainly used by clinical psychologists for the initial onboarding of their clients. There is no strict limitation on what type of clinical psychologist you need to be. Whether you work in the community, education, hospital, or organizations, you can use this template to help you streamline the onboarding experience, and quickly and effectively understand your clients before you meet them. Don’t forget that it is your clients that are filling out the psychology intake form, all you have to do is to distribute it to them.

Why Is This Form Useful For Psychologists

Track Progress

The psychology intake form helps you document the initial stage of your patient. This provides an anchor for your future treatment, allowing you to have a reference point to track your client’s progress. It also helps you to clarify the client’s initial goal of therapy when situations get complicated.

Client Consent

The psychology intake form allows you to gain consent from your patient to disclose their information. It is important to gain legal consent, as it conforms with the HIPAA requirement and the medical laws in your country.

Streamline Onboarding

By using a unified psychology intake form template, you can streamline your onboarding experience for future clients. It can significantly reduce your time spent on paperwork and help keep everything nicely organized.

Benefits of Psychology Intake Forms

Improved Accessibility

Our fillable pdf form is highly accessible and user-friendly. We built our forms so that you start typing straight away within the text fields. There is no more hustle of trying to convert your form into Word and worrying about the format getting messy, or having to draw each text box separately on the pdf.

Holistic Understanding

A psychology intake form gives you a more holistic understanding of your upcoming client. It helps you to gain more awareness of your client’s social background, medical background, and current mental state.

Improved Organisation

Having templates that are designed with consistency helps you quickly locate information in familiar sections. Either having all your documents digitally or printed, this process will save you time, since you no longer have to go through a bunch of headings that are organized poorly to get to the part you want.

Reduce Errors

With a variety of preexisting fields that you need to fill out or select, the form will remind you or your clients of the necessary information. This will reduce the chance of missing information from the intake process.

Reference Point

An intake form in clinical psychology is a great place to record a reference point to follow your client’s progression and guide the direction throughout the process. It also gives confidence to the psychologist and the clients to see how far they have progressed throughout the sessions.