Camp and school health forms: what to have ready

A camp health form has two halves. You fill in the first: contacts, allergies, medicines, immunization dates, insurance and a signed permission. Your child's health-care provider completes the exam half, and you can't. Keep your answers on one page all year, then copy from it.

This is for parents of a child heading to a US camp, school or sports team. Every place sets its own requirements, so the form and instructions it sends beat this page. It isn't medical advice.

Example: the parent half of one camp form

Say the packet arrives in April and the return date is three weeks away. You open the parent pages and start hunting: a vaccine record in a drawer, a member ID on a card in your wallet, the dose of the allergy pill on a bottle. The table shows what one widely used camp form (the American Camp Association's Camper Health History Form) asks on its parent pages, next to an invented answer for a made-up child. Every name and number is made up.

What the form asks, and a filled sample (example)

The child is invented. The right column is where you would copy the answer from.

Notice how much of the right column is one page you already own, and how little of it is memory. The two entries that need a document are the vaccine dates and the insurance card, which is why they take longest.

Who fills in what

On the ACA form the split is written into the instructions.

Work through it in this order

1. Get this year's forms and read the instructions before you write anything. Find the return date and mark which pages are yours and which are for the provider.
2. Book the provider's visit first, since it depends on someone else's calendar. The ACA form's instructions are to give the provider a copy of your completed parent pages along with their own page.
3. Fill in your pages by copying from your one page, not from memory. Where the form asks something your page doesn't hold, write it on your page too, so next year it's there.
4. For vaccines, attach a copy of the record. The ACA form says copies from a health-care provider or a state or local government are acceptable, and asks for the month and year of each dose. Ask your provider's office for the record if you don't have it.
5. List every medicine, including vitamins and natural remedies. The ACA form defines medication that broadly. Check the camp's rules on packaging: the form notes that many states require original pharmacy containers with labels, and a sample ACA camp policy says the same and has a nurse handle them. Ask the camp how much to send.
6. If the form asks for insurance, copy both sides of the card as it instructs. Keep the card itself.
7. Read the permission paragraph before you sign it. On the ACA form it lets the camp's physician treat your child in an emergency and lets the camp share the form with staff on a need-to-know basis. It's yours to sign, not the doctor's.
8. Send the signed original by the return date and keep a copy, as the form directs. Put the copy with your page.

Where a page of answers stops helping

The yes and no history section is the part a parent's page covers least. The ACA form asks about hospital stays, surgeries, recurring illnesses, injuries, asthma, seizures, travel outside the country in the past nine months and more, then invites you to explain each yes. Answer from what you know and say so when you're unsure. If a yes needs detail you don't have, the provider's office can supply it.

An allergy or asthma action plan is another case. That's a document your child's clinician writes and signs, and a page you typed can't stand in for it. Ask the clinician and the school or camp what they want on file. Sports and school forms may split the same way or not, so read each one's instructions instead of assuming.

Questions parents ask

Where the Family Health Binder fits

Family Health Binder keeps these answers for each child, and its Forms sheet prints them in the order many forms ask: birth date and emergency contact, insurance, doctors and pharmacy, allergies, conditions, medicines and vaccines. Vaccines are names and dates you type from the record, and the sheet never says what is due. It doesn't fill in the form, hold the provider's page or an action plan, or keep a scan of a card or record. You can mark a record private so it stays off the printed page, and the sheet says how many it left off. For the shorter sheet a sitter needs, see the babysitter and grandparent info sheet. For what to keep off any page you hand over, see what to leave off a health page.