Intake and Assessment

Many substance abuse facilities treat the intake and assessment appointment as a standard clerical process or task, often ignoring clients’ needs. For many clients the intake and assessment appointment will be their first face to face interaction with a facility. This time should be viewed as an opportunity to engage and motivate the client in their own treatment. Too often the assessment appointment is a purely administrative function which can turn off clients and lead to a premature exit from treatment. Actually, intake and assessment appointments can be viewed as a chance to help motivate clients to engage in treatment. By instituting some form of process improvement many organizations have been able to take advantage of this time and have increased the number of clients’ actually entering treatment. What follows is a review of the relevant literature which provides empirical evidence to support the notion that intake and assessment impacts treatment retention.