CRITERIA FOR APPROVAL FOR MFT CONTINUING EDUCATION

 I: Preface

All educational activities sponsored and administered directly by The American Association for Marriage & Family Therapy, Inc. and/or by NEAFAST are accepted as approved CE activities without the requirement of a review. All activities for LMFT CE certification are approved individually. NEAFAST does not certify organizations.

II: Content Areas and Core Competencies

In order to be approved as Continuing Education for MFTs in Massachusetts a program must be relevant to the practice by improving clinicians’ skills related to one or more of the following six domains (as defined by AAMFT as enhancing family therapists’ “core competencies”) 

1) Admission to Treatment – All interactions between clients and therapist up to the point when a therapeutic contract is established. 

2) Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis – Activities focused on the identification of the issues to be addressed in therapy. 

3) Treatment Planning and Case Management – All activities focused on directing the course of therapy and extra-therapeutic activities. 

4) Therapeutic Interventions – All activities designed to ameliorate the clinical issues identified. 

5) Legal Issues, Ethics, and Standards – All aspects of therapy that involve statutes, regulations, principles, values, and mores of MFTs. 

6) Research and Program Evaluation – All aspects of therapy that involve the systematic analysis of therapy and how it is conducted effectively. 

The application will ask which domain(s) the course content is connected to.

In keeping with NEAFAST’s mission and MFT ethics, all approved programs should enhance clinical skills in cultural competency/humility, diversity, equity and/or social justice.

III: Instructor Qualifications:

To be eligible for MFT CE certification, at least one of the instructors or presenters at each meeting of the activity must meet at least one of the following criteria.

1. Licensed MFT (in any state or Canadian province).

2. Clinical member, or approved supervisor or supervisor-in-training, NEAFAST or AAMFT.

3. Other licensed mental health professional with two or more years experience doing family and systemic therapy.

4. Staff member of an agency providing family and systemic therapy services, with at least two years of experience.

5. Faculty member of an educational institution teaching family and systemic therapy.

6. Other qualified professional with experience relevant to this particular activity (NOTE: application will require explanation and will be subject to approval).

7. Non-professional with relevant experience (NOTE: application will require explanation and will be subject to approval).

Please use the following codes for Professional License Type when completing the application - 

Only one qualified instructor is required for each activity. There is no need to provide information about all instructors in the application.

IIII: Definitions and Clarifications

• Definition of contact hour: 50 - 60 minutes of educational activity, not to include breaks or registration. Educational programming during meals is accepted as part of contact time. Time spent for breaks, socializing, registration and meals must be subtracted.


• 1 hour of activity is the minimum for certification. There is no maximum.


• Undergraduate courses offered towards a bachelor’s degree do not fit the definition of “professional continuing education” and ARE NOT eligible for MFT certification.


• Graduate courses attended toward a master's or doctorate or other post-bachelor’s degree ARE eligible for consideration for LMFT CE certification. Participants may either attend as auditors or degree candidates.


• Instructors of any LMFT certified activity may count their actual face-to-face contact teaching time toward their own CE requirements for the first time that they teach one particular course. Courses must be certified for CE credit. Non-certified activities, including academic courses that were not certified, require the "Retroactive Application" in Massachusetts. Instructors should be given certificates of attendance. A maximum of 15 CE instructor hours will be granted during each renewal period. 

• Webcasts and Live Interactive Virtual Programming: A webcast is a broadcast of a live event that is viewed over the internet at the time it is broadcast. A live interactive virtual program is live, interactive learning through video teleconference software such as Zoom, Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, etc. Webcasts and Live Interactive Virtual Programming will be considered identical to live, face-to-face events if they: track registrations and participation; allow for questions by attendees; collect program evaluations prior to granting credit. LMFTs may count any number of CE hours in qualified webcasts or live interactive virtual programs toward license renewal. A webcast must obtain its own unique certification, even if the underlying live event has been certified.


• On-Demand, Archived and Home Study: Recorded training events viewed over the internet, or downloaded from an archive, at a time after the original broadcast, or home study programs obtained over the internet or via postal mail, are all considered “on-demand” distance learning and are treated differently, even if the broadcast is identical to the original webcast. A qualified webcast becomes “on-demand” if it is downloaded and viewed at a later time. On-demand distance learning programs can be certified for up to one year for any number of potential viewers; however, there may be limits as to the number of required CEs Massachusetts LMFTs can count toward license renewal. Vendors are required to submit a post-test for all on-demand events with a minimum of 6 questions per learning hour.

• Adjusted credit: At the sponsor’s discretion, licensees who do not attend the entire activity may be granted a proportional amount of CE credit, so long as they attended a minimum of 80% of the activities for which they were registered. The sponsor is responsible for documenting the participant’s attendance schedule.

• MULTIPLE ACTIVITIES IN A SERIES: If your program design requires that participants register for all of the workshops or other activities in a series, and there is one overall title for the series, then only one application is needed for the entire series. An example would be a year-long course meeting once each month. Total contact hours for the entire series should be indicated on the application. At least one qualified instructor present at each meeting must be identified. All activity meetings should be listed under “Activity Schedule” on the application. Attach additional pages as needed or include your brochure and reference it in the “Schedule” section of the application. In some cases the program design permits participants to register for any number of activities in a series. An example would be monthly in-service trainings on a variety of topics. Participants must then be offered variable CE credit, depending on their choices. If your program design permits participants to register for less than the entire series, each meeting is then considered a separate CE activity and separate applications are required for each.

• CONFERENCES: Conferences may be either single day or multi-day meetings, which contain many choices of workshops in some or all time slots. One application may be submitted for the entire conference if: Participants all receive the same number of CE credit regardless of which workshops they attend; and, The title and printed description include prominent references to MFT or one of the approved content areas (see Content Criteria), or if it can be documented that more than 50% of the available meetings have MFT or related content areas in their title and/or descriptions. Documentation must be submitted along with the application. Conferences that cannot meet these criteria can still submit individual applications for any workshop for which MFT CE certification is requested. Certificate of Attendance: Licensees who participate in conferences should receive CE certificates of attendance showing the number of hours of certified activities they have attended. In some cases, this number will not be the same as the total number of contact hours available at the conference. Conferences should provide an opportunity within the registration process to identify the correct number of MFT CE credits to be received by each licensee.

For any questions not addressed above please contact [email protected]