As a health and wellness professional, it’s your duty to guide your clients and ensure they achieve their health and wellness goals. But to achieve that, you will need some background information about their current health and physical condition. This is part of the welcoming process. Such information will help you to come up with training programs or nutritional plans, which will guide them accordingly.
And this is where health and wellness assessment questionnaires come in. But, if you’ve never used a health and wellness questionnaire before, you may be wondering how to create one or where to start.
Well, this article has the answers. In this guide, we will walk you through the basics of health and wellness assessment questionnaires, the importance of these questionnaires in your health and wellness business, as well as tips for formulating an effective one.
1. About a Health and Wellness Assessment Questionnaire
As its name suggests, a health and wellness assessment questionnaire is a research or survey instrument featuring a set of questions designed to collect a client’s health and wellness information.
The type of questions featured on the questionnaire will depend on your area of specialization. For instance, if you are a fitness coach, you may ask questions that can help you assess the client’s current fitness level. On the other hand, if you are a dietician, you can focus on questions related to the client’s eating habits.
2. Importance of a Wellness Assessment Questionnaire
Whether you are a fitness coach, a nutritionist or a personal trainer, it’s important to ask your clients some health and wellness questions as part of the onboarding process. So, why is this assessment important?
Well, assessing your clients via a health and wellness questionnaire before starting your health and wellness program is important for the following reasons:
2.1 Create a Personalized Plan
People have different needs and goals when it comes to health and fitness. Hence, you cannot come up with a single health and wellness plan and assume it will benefit everyone in your class, whether this class be offline or online.
Instead, you need to come up with a personalized training program or diet plan for each of your clients. But, you cannot create such a plan without adequate details about each client, thus the need for a health and wellness assessment questionnaire.
A well-written health and wellness questionnaire will help you gather basic details about the client as well as their needs and goals.
After gathering these details, you can then create a customized training, diet or meal plan for each of your clients. And with a customized meal plan or training program, your clients will achieve better results compared to using a generic one.
2.2 Track Ongoing Progress
It’s your responsibility to track and measure your client’s ongoing health and wellness progress levels. If you fail to track this progress, it will be hard to determine whether your recommendations are working or whether you need to make some changes.
In case your diet plans or training methods are not delivering the expected results, your health and wellness business will take a considerable hit. And if this continues, you will lose credibility.
Fortunately, the health and wellness survey questions that your client answered when joining your program will help you to track their ongoing progress. And from there, you can modify your training programs or diet plans accordingly.
2.3 Avoid Legal Challenges
A health and wellness survey can also help you to avoid legal challenges, which may arise due to negligence lawsuits.
For instance, your client may have an underlying health condition such as high blood pressure or heart disease. And, if you fail to conduct a health and wellness assessment before they join your health, fitness or wellness program, how will you know such details?
And without this information, you may end up creating an unsafe diet plan or training program for them, thus worsening their condition. In case the condition becomes fatal, their family may sue you for wrongful death.
As you may probably know, lawsuits are not only time-consuming but are costly. In case the lawsuit is awarded, you may be required to pay thousands of dollars. Furthermore, such a lawsuit can damage your reputation as a health and wellness professional, making it hard to land jobs in the future.
Therefore, before you start any training program or a diet plan with a client, it’s important to determine their physical, health and fitness levels and limitations. Conducting a health and fitness screening will help to protect yourself against negligence claims.
3. Tips on Formulating Health and Wellness Assessment Questionnaires
Completing a health and wellness screening questionnaire should be the standard operating procedure for every service provider in this industry as part of a client onboarding process.
However, if you are doing it for the first time, the process can feel overwhelming or intimidating. But, it doesn’t have to be. Here are some tips that will help you to do it right and get the results you are looking for:
3.1 Be Clear and Concise
Regardless of how much information you want to obtain via your health and wellness assessment questionnaires, it’s important to keep them brief.
If the questions are too long or complicated, you may end up with insincere or incorrect answers. Consequently, any plans or programs that you create with that information will also be flawed.
To this end, you should keep your questions as brief as possible. Also, use everyday language that everyone will understand.
3.2 Be Specific and Direct
When completing your wellness assessment questionnaire, your goal is to collect information related to your client’s health, wellness, and fitness.
So, make sure your wellness questionnaire only contains questions related to these aspects. Asking unnecessary or irrelevant questions that don’t add value to your wellness questionnaire can be a waste of time for both you and the client.
Besides, you may come across as unprofessional. And that’s not the way to start your relationship with the client.
3.2 Provide a N/A Option
As much as your questions may be simple and concise, your clients may still be unable to answer some of them.
In such a situation, either the client doesn’t know how to respond to the health and wellness survey question or they haven’t experienced it.
For such cases, your wellness questionnaires should always have “not applicable” or “doesn’t apply” options.
4. Questions to Avoid When Formulating Wellness Assessment Questionnaires
Your health and wellness survey questions should help you gather accurate information about your client’s level of health of wellness.
With that in mind, there are certain questions that you may include in your wellness assessment questionnaire, which may lead to inaccurate or incorrect answers. They include:
4.1 Leading Questions
Leading questions are a type of survey questions, which may prompt the respondent to answer the question in a certain manner, based on the way it’s framed.
For instance, you can have a question in your questionnaire that asks, “most of my clients eat three meals a day. How many meals do you take in a day?”
With such a question, there’s a high chance the client will say “three times a day.” And this information may not be correct. Instead, the question should go directly to the point and ask, “how many meals do you take in a day.” When you use this approach, there’s a high chance the client will respond with the correct answer.
4.2 Double Barreled Questions
Including questions that require too many answers in your wellness assessment form will overwhelm the respondent or confuse them.
As a result, they will either skip it, provide just a single answer, or provide a vague answer. Hence, you will miss out on the other information you were looking for with that question.
For example, you can include a question that asks, “Do you need a fitness program that will help you lose weight and build muscle?”
Such a question can be confusing to some people. As you may probably know, some people join fitness programs simply to lose weight and not necessarily build tons of muscle.
On the other hand, there are those who simply want to build muscle as their main fitness goal.
Hence, it will be highly advisable to split the question into two. Doing so will help your client to respond with an accurate answer.
4.3 Pushy Wellness Survey Questions
The goal of your health and wellness questionnaire is to collect honest and accurate responses.
Unfortunately, pushy questions will do the opposite. When you ask a pushy question, you are somehow forcing the client to respond in a certain way.
For such questions, the respondent is only required to choose from a list of pre-selected items or categories, thus preventing them from providing accurate responses.
5. Wrapping It Up
Overall, health and wellness assessment questionnaires can be a powerful means of learning more about your clients. Also, they will help you to come up with personalized diet plans or training programs designed for each individual client, among other benefits. But, you need to ensure that the data you gather through these questionnaires is accurate and reliable. By following the tips and guidelines that we’ve offered in this article, you should no longer find it hard to formulate health and wellness assessment questionnaires for your clients.