Ultimate Guide to Client Onboarding in Your Nutrition Practice
The professional-client relationship is fostered from the moment you conduct the first counselling session. It determines how your treatment plan is going to be forged and what outcome your client expects out of your services.
As integral it is, onboarding a new client into your practice is a very intricate and essential process, which if not done properly can risk the very foundation of your relationship. Hence, you need to make sure that you collect all the necessary information of your client and adhere to a proper client onboarding process.
3 Essential Elements of Client Onboarding
While taking a new client into your practice, there are 3 major elements that you need to assess in order to understand the respective client’s problem, as well as their lifestyle preferences.
- Conduct a Lifestyle Assessment
When you are providing your clients with a nutritional and healthcare service, you are basically constructing a more refined lifestyle regime that will help them live healthier lives. So, in order to help them live a healthier life, you at least need to know their current lifestyle and assess what’s wrong with it.
To remedy this requirement, leading nutritionists around the world are creating their own lifestyle assessment form to get a closer glimpse into their onboarding client’s lifestyles.
While making a lifestyle assessment form for onboarding clients, make sure that you add these factors into the form:
- Veg/non-veg preferences
- Allergies
- Food likes & dislikes
- Fasting days
- Alcohol & Smoking frequencies
- Conduct a Medical Assessment
When it comes to onboarding a new client, you need to familiarize yourself with your client’s entire medical history and keep a detailed note of their weight and measurements. In a traditional manner, nutritionists used to sit with their clients for hours and note down each and every detail of their history.
However, to make this process a lot faster, leading nutritionists are adopting medical assessment forms that they distribute amongst their clients to gather their medical information.
While making a medical assessment form for onboarding clients, make sure that you add these factors into the form:
- Weight & measurements
- Blood group
- Chronic diseases
- Pregnancy & menstrual history
- Dropbox to attach medical reports
- Ask for Diet Recall
A diet recall is a dietary assessment of a patient or a client that consists of a structured interview with the intention of capturing all food items and beverages consumed in a set time frame.
Usually, nutritionists and dietitians conduct a thorough diet recall which includes noting down meal intervals, portion sizes, water intake, as well as sleep duration to paint a detailed picture of how their clients go about their day.
Diet recall is an integral part of a particular client’s treatment, both while onboarding and during the treatment, as it analyzes their lifestyle and nutrition intake. It can also help you detect some of the root causes of their healthcare problems which are linked with unhealthy diet habits.
Here are the major components of a good diet recall form:
- Food intervals throughout the day
- Duration of the meal
- Specifications of the meal
Stay on Top of All Your Client’s Important Info
Not only does it lead to an ineffective treatment plan, but without collecting all the necessary information about your clients you are also putting them at risk. You could accidentally make them perform exercises that they are not fit for, or direct them to eat harmful products that are detrimental to their health.
Hence, it is very necessary that you perform a thorough client onboarding process and we provide you with this article for that exact reason.
