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 continuing education activities without the requirement of a review and DO NOT need to be processed through the individual retroactive CE program. All other activities for LMFT CE certification are approved individually.

II: Content Areas and Core Competencies

An educational event is defined as a structured learning experience, designed to improve an clinician's knowledge, skills, or performance in the domain of Marriage and Family Therapy. To be eligible for Continuing Education approval, an event must have defined educational objectives, be designed to meet specific learning outcomes, must be directly relevant to the practice of Marriage and Family Therapy, and must include a process of evaluation of efficacy of the training. Networking events, wellness activities (e.g. a therapist specific yoga class), independent Q&A panels that do not directly address LMFT specific issues, marketing education or management trainings are not eligible for Continuing Education credits. 

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, diagnostic criteria and application, and skills/tools for formal or informal assessment.  

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 for MFTs. 

6) Research and Program Evaluation – All aspects of therapy that involve the systematic analysis of therapy, modalities, assessments, development and course of disorders (etc.), and how it is conducted effectively and ethically. 

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. NEAFAST will not approve programs that are in conflict with the AAMFT Code of Ethics or Massachusetts regulations governing the practice of Marriage and Family Therapy.

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, of NEAFAST or the 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 - 

IIII: Definitions and Clarifications

• Educational Event: An educational event is defined as a structured learning experience, designed to improve an clinician's knowledge, skills, or performance in the domain of Marriage and Family Therapy. To be eligible for Continuing Education approval, an event must have defined educational objectives, be designed to meet specific learning outcomes, must be directly relevant to the practice of Marriage and Family Therapy, and must include a process of evaluation of efficacy of the training. Networking events, wellness activities (e.g. a therapist specific yoga class), independent Q&A panels, marketing education or management trainings are not eligible for Continuing Education credits. 
  
  

• 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.
NEAFAST approves CEU programs in increments of .25. Please round down to the nearest quarter hour in your application if you are in between. 

• 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 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 using our Sponsor Single Event Application. 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.

• A Single event Series: If your program design requires that participants register for all of the workshops or other activities in a series, and there is one certificate provided for the entire series, then only one application is needed for the entire series. An example would be a year-long course meeting once each month. All activity meetings should be listed under “Activity Schedule” on the application. 

• Single events offering multiple CE Certificates or Series events with separate CE Certificates: In some cases a program design may permit participants to register for any number of activities in a series or provide separate CE Certificates for separate sections of a training. 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 portion which provides a separate CE certificate. 

• 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). 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 must 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.

Please review the above criteria carefully as NEAFAST does not offer refunds for application fees in circumstances where programs are rejected for not meeting the continuing education requirements.

If you have any questions not addressed above please contact [email protected]