Wellness assessment

Wellness assessments can be helpful measures to gauge a client's overall well-being. 

This article provides an overview of wellness evaluations, key components, and examples of how to use therapy check-in worksheets with different strategies to suggest to clients. 

We’ve also included a free downloadable health and wellness worksheet to save to your electronic health record (EHR) and use in your practice. 

What is a wellness evaluation?

A wellness evaluation or wellness assessment is one of several tools therapists use to evaluate different aspects of a client’s life to understand their overall well-being. Wellness assessments may be helpful as part of an intake evaluation, to inform treatment planning, or periodically to measure a client’s progress. 

There are many types of wellness assessments, some focusing on overall wellness and others more specific to mental health. Due to the wide range of conceptualizations that describe wellness and its domains, researchers have been challenged to evaluate the effectiveness of well-being and wellness assessments in health promotion. 

Overall, however, the scope of these wellness evaluations is to provide a holistic measure of important domains in a person's life, including: 

• Physical health

• Mental health

• Intellectual pursuits

• Social functioningSpiritual well-being

• Occupational fulfillment

• Financial health

• Environmental well-being

More culturally relevant assessments also consider the context of culture and value systems to measure fulfillment, which we’ve highlighted below.

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Wellness assessment questionnaires 

Some of the commonly used wellness assessment and mental health questionnaires include:

The Wheel of Life

This tool uses a visual illustration of a wheel to map out a person’s satisfaction in different domains of their life, including relationships, physical health, career, personal growth, finances, emotional health, and environment. 

Health-Related Quality of Life Assessment (HRQoL)

Therapists, psychologists, and other clinicians use this wellness assessment to measure clients' feelings about their daily functioning and well-being. It also assesses progress and identifies areas of impairment, such as mood, energy levels, and social connections.

KIDSCREEN

This is an HRQoL measure for children and adolescents aged eight to 18.It asks clients to chart their physical, emotional, mental, social, and school functioning. 

This wellness evaluation tool is cross-culturally validated in more than 20 countries and is available in multiple languages.

WHOQOL-BREF

Developed by the World Health Organization, this wellness assessment measures quality of life in an individual’s perception of their location in life in the context of culture and value systems in which they live, and their goals, expectations, standards, and concerns. WHOQOL is available in 15 languages and is applicable cross-culturally. 

PERMA Profiler

Based on Martin Seligman’s Positive Psychology model, this wellness assessment measures well-being and flourishing. Its categories include positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. 

The Flourishing Measure

This measure assesses five central domains of wellness, including happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close relationships.  

Mental and emotional health wellness assessments 

These health and wellness worksheets can be used on intake and periodically throughout treatment to measure progress. 

• Mental Health Continuum–Short Form (MHC-SF): This assessment measures emotional, psychological, and social well-being. 

• Generalized anxiety disorder-7 (GAD-7): A client-based assessment of anxiety symptoms and impairment. The GAD-7 is used to measure anxiety and track progress throughout treatment clinically. 

• Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9): The PHQ-9 assessment screens for depression and measures depressive symptoms and their impact on daily functioning. 

• Outcome Rating Scale (ORS): This wellness evaluation measures well-being across individual, social, interpersonal, and overall functioning. It can be used as a quick therapy check-in worksheet at the start of sessions. 

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How to use the wellness assessment

You can download and use the wellness evaluation in several ways.

For example, print or screen share the wellness worksheet as a psychoeducational session prompt. You could also give the worksheet to the client to remind them of what you discussed during therapy. 

Use the evaluation as part of your wellness toolbox worksheets to measure client progress.

Lastly, ask the client to reflect on the wellness evaluation between sessions, assess their well-being and areas for improvement, or use their insights to identify treatment goals. Then, ask the client to discuss their findings at their next therapy appointment. 

Sources

• Bart, R., Ishak, W. W., Ganjian, S., Jaffer, K. Y., Abdelmesseh, M., Hanna, S., Gohar, Y., Azar, G., Vanle, B., Dang, J., & Danovitch, I. (2018). The Assessment and Measurement of Wellness in the Clinical Medical Setting: A Systematic Review. Innovations in clinical neuroscience.

• Kauppi, K., Vanhala, A., Roos, E., & Torkki, P. (2023). Assessing the structures and domains of wellness models: A systematic review. International Journal of Wellbeing.

• Orth, Z., van Wyk, B. (2021). Measuring mental wellness among adolescents living with a physical chronic condition: a systematic review of the mental health and mental well-being instruments. BMC Psychology. 

• VanderWeele, T.J. (2017). On the promotion of human flourishing. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A6. 

• University of New Hampshire. (n.d.). Wellness Wheel Assessment.

• University of Colorado Boulder. (n.d.). Personal Assessment: 8 Dimensions of Wellness.

• World Health Organization. (2012). The World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL).

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