As an MFT trainee you must receive one unit of supervision during each week you are claiming experience (workshop and personal psychotherapy hours are excluded). You are also required to receive an additional unit of supervision for every five hours of direct counseling experience claimed at each setting. This second requirement is a ratio of counseling experience to supervision units at each setting and can be averaged across your experience at each site. For example, if you log 10 counseling hours and 1 unit of supervision in a week you may still claim all 10 hours of experience as long as you make up the extra unit of supervision during one of your remaining weeks at the site.
When determining whether you have met the supervision requirements the following categories should be included when totaling your “direct counseling experience” hours:
- Individual Counseling or Psychotherapy
- Couples, Family, and Child Psychotherapy (conjoint couples and family hours are NOT double counted for purposes of calculating your ratio)
- Group Therapy or Counseling
- Telemedicine Counseling
Your supervision hours should be converted to units as follows:
- 1 individual supervision hours = 1 unit
- 2 group supervision hours = 1 unit
To calculate your ratio divide your direct counseling experience hours (the sum of the categories above) by your supervision units logged as a trainee. Your experience to supervision ratio must be 5.0 or less. For example, if you have logged 200 direct counseling experience hours and have received 40 units of supervision, your ratio would be 5.0 (200/40=5). In this example you could claim all of the experience hours logged. Note that you must perform this calculation independently for each of your sites.
As a second example let’s assume you logged 200 direct counseling hours and received 20 units of supervision. Your ratio would be 10.0 (200/20=10). In this example you would not be able to claim all of the direct counseling hours that you logged. To determine how many counseling hours you can claim you would multiple your supervision units by 5. In this example you could only claim 100 of the 200 direct counseling hours that you logged (20 units of supervision x 5 = 100).
If you are a subscriber to TrackYourHours you do not have to manually calculate your ratios. TrackYourHours automatically calculates your supervision ratios and alerts you if there is an issue. To view your ratio(s), simply click the Reports & Forms tab and then click Ratio Reports. Here you will see a summary of your direct counseling experience, supervision units and the ratio calculation for each of your trainee sites.