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Preparing for a Doctor’s Appointment
Your Appointments Should Be for You…and About You!
A medical appointment is a meeting about your health and ways to improve it. Like any meeting, it helps to prepare ahead of time. During your appointment, doctors identify and solve health issues.
Doctors use an appointment workflow during your appointment. The workflow works like a funnel so sharing and negotiating the goals helps to focus the appointment appropriately.
Being prepared and sharing your information within the doctor’s workflow helps your doctor help you.
After your visit, your doctor writes an appointment note that will include a summary of the appointment and your care plan with the next steps.
There are three steps to preparing for an appointment:
1.
Clarify Your Goal for the Appointment
Before your appointment, identify your goal or desired outcome.
What is the most important thing you want to focus on? Are you having new or ongoing symptoms? Would you like to discuss trialing a different treatment? Do you have questions, concerns, or fears?
Your goals for the care you want are unique to you. Your goals combine your priorities, preferences, values, knowledge about your body, experiences, and rare diseases.
You want to give the doctor the time and space to address your issues, so prioritize and limit your goals for each appointment. You can ask how best to handle any goals or topics not covered in that appointment.
Identifying and communicating your goal with your doctor ensures you are aligned and focused on what is most important to you.
Gather Your Related Information
➤ Symptoms
The information you share with your doctor will help the doctor address your chief complaint. Your symptoms are a crucial part of that information. It can be hard to remember all the details, so it is helpful to think through it before the appointment.When sharing your symptoms, be specific, concise, and clear. Graphs and spreadsheets can be beneficial for tracking and visually communicating your symptoms. Photos and videos can help capture your experiences. Sharing how your symptoms affect your daily life, your ability to work, and overall quality of life can help your doctor understand these symptoms’ impact on your life.Your doctor will ask questions to better understand your experience. Questions may include:
- What are your symptoms?
- When did it start?
- What makes it worse? Better?
- What have you tried?
- How is this different than your usual?
- What has worked well in the past?
Prioritizing your symptoms and information based on your goals and issues helps your doctor help you.
➤ Your medical history and family medical history.
Your doctor needs to know your history regarding your chief complaint, including your medical history, related family history, testing, and current and previous treatments. Doctors use this information to make testing, diagnosis, and treatment decisions. This template may help you organize this information.
➤ What has worked/ what hasn’t worked
Sharing previous treatments trialed and your results with the treatments will help your doctor make better suggestions about treatment options. A list or a table of the medication, date prescribed, prescribing doctor and results allows your doctor to understand what has worked and what hasn’t.
➤ Medications and dosages
An updated medication list helps your doctor decide appropriate treatment options. A list or table including medication, dosage, prescribing doctor and reason.
➤ Allergies
Keeping an updated list of allergies and adverse reactions keeps you safe and helps your doctor find the appropriate treatment.
Write down any questions, fears, and concerns
Your questions, fears, and concerns are important. Your doctor should answer your questions, and sharing your fears and concerns may provide clues for your doctor.
To prepare for an appointment, gather the following information to share with your doctor:
What has worked/ what hasn’t worked
Sharing previous treatments you have tried and your results with the treatments will help your doctor make better suggestions about treatment options. A list or a table of the medication, date prescribed, prescribing doctor and results allows your doctor to understand what has worked and what hasn’t.
Medications and dosages
An updated list of your current medication helps your doctor further determine appropriate treatment options to suggest. This list should include the name of the medicine, dose, prescribing doctor and reason you take the medicine.
Allergies
Keeping an updated list of allergies and adverse reactions keeps you safe and helps your doctor find the appropriate treatment.
Your Appointment Agenda
An appointment agenda can help you prepare and organize your goals, information, and thoughts. You can tailor this easy-to-use communication tool to fit any situation perfectly. We’ve created a Appointment Agenda PDF template for you to use.
Things to include:
- Name, Birthdate, Date
- Goals to focus on today (1-3 goals)
- Symptoms in order of importance
- Relevant history
- Questions, concerns, and fears
Optional
- Medications (or on a separate sheet)
- Updates from other appts, ER, hospital
- Request for prescriptions, referrals, etc.
Bring a printed copy of the agenda for you and your doctor to follow, or send it via email to the doctor’s office before your appointment. Ask to add it to your medical record so it creates a comprehensive history of your appointments.
Before your next appointment, look at your last appointment’s agenda and see if your goals, symptoms, and questions are the same.
Additional Resources:
- Getting Your Doctor to Listen to You Guide (Healing Hugs Haven)
- How to Talk to Your Doctor (National Patient Advocate Foundation)
- My Doctor Appointment Summary Template
Go to Attending a Doctor’s Appointment ➙
