Medical Family Therapy Program

Program Director: Jackie Williams-Reade, PhD, LMFT
2011 – Ph.D., Medical Family Therapy | East Carolina University, Greenville, NC
2005 – M.S., Marriage and Family Therapy | Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA

Contact Info: jwilliamsreade@llu.edu | (909) 558-4547 x47025

Mission Statement

The Medical Family Therapy Program is consistent with Loma Linda University’s vision of transforming lives through whole person health care. The mission of the program is to support health, healing, and relational wholeness through education, research, clinical training, and community service. The Medical Family Therapy Program accomplishes this through addressing relational concerns, spiritual beliefs and practices, contextual elements such as socioeconomic status and ethnicity, and disease and healing processes of patients and their families.

Medical Family Therapy Certificate

The Medical Family Therapy certificate is offered by the School of Behavioral Health through the Department of Counseling and Family Sciences. Through formalized didactic and clinical training, students learn to provide systemic therapeutic interventions to address the physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational needs of patients in medical settings. Through learning and applying a biopsychosocial-spiritual approach, students in the medical family therapy certificate program work as behavioral health interns in medical settings providing care to patients and family members dealing with chronic and critical illness, providing support to medical team members, and enhancing the whole patient system.

Class Schedule

Admission Requirements

Applicants to the certificate program in Medical Family Therapy must meet the School of Behavioral Health admission requirements as outlined in the Loma Linda University Catalog and give evidence of academic ability, professional comportment and mature judgment. Additional admission requirements include:

• Master’s degree in marital and family therapy or closely related field from an accredited institution
• Courses with the following core content (include syllabi with application): Psychopharmacology, Child Abuse and Family Violence, Family Theories, Human Development across the Lifespan.
• 500 documented supervised clinical hours with children, families, and adults
• Up to 6 credits may be transferred into the certificate program with the consent of the Program Director.
• Individuals who are only interested in the certificate program must apply to the university and provide all required materials including transcripts, proof of clinical work, syllabi for prerequisite courses, three letters of recommendation, etc.
• Students enrolled in the PhD in MFT or the DMFT at LLU may take the certificate concurrently as part of their degree requirements. Completion of the certificate will require students to enroll in certificate courses in lieu of their required electives for their respective degrees. See doctoral program requirements for further details.

*DMFT/PhD in MFT students are encouraged to apply for the certificate no later than the beginning of the second year of their doctoral studies.