Qualiopi, CERP: No Label Guarantees the Scientific Reliability of Your Training

Since January 1, 2022, Qualiopi certification has been mandatory for all training organisations seeking access to public and pooled funding in France: OPCOs, CPF, FIFPL, regional funds. For IBCLCs and healthcare professionals looking for continuing education in lactation, this logo has become ubiquitous on sales pages. On social media, learners sometimes even recommend a training by mentioning it is Qualiopi-certified, as if this were a mark of content quality.

But is Qualiopi certification a guarantee of the scientific quality of the content taught?

What Qualiopi Actually Evaluates

Qualiopi is a certification of organisational processes, issued by certification bodies accredited by COFRAC on the basis of the National Quality Framework (RNQ), derived from the law of September 5, 2018 "for the freedom to choose one's professional future".

This framework comprises 7 criteria broken down into 32 indicators. They cover:

The conditions under which the public is informed about the services offered
The identification of learning objectives and their alignment with beneficiaries' needs
The adaptation of services to target audiences, including people with disabilities
The adequacy of pedagogical, technical and supervisory resources
The qualification and development of staff competencies
Integration into the professional environment through regular monitoring
The collection and consideration of stakeholder feedback

What you will not find anywhere in these 32 indicators: a requirement for level of evidence, an obligation to rely on evidence-based data, a verification of the scientific accuracy of content, or any protection against conflicts of interest on the part of the trainer.

An organisation can obtain Qualiopi while teaching practices unsupported by the literature, disseminating recommendations contradicted by recent meta-analyses, or drawing a substantial part of its revenues from industrial partnerships , provided it does so in an organised, documented, and evaluated manner.

Qualiopi Can Also Be Obtained by Outsourcing

There is a market reality rarely mentioned: obtaining Qualiopi does not require possessing the administrative skills in-house.

An entire ecosystem of specialist service providers offers to support — or even fully manage — compliance and certification audit preparation. For a fee, an external consultant can build your document system, write your procedures, prepare your evidence and coach you for the audit.

In concrete terms, this means an organisation can be Qualiopi-certified without its academic director ever having written a single quality procedure themselves, and without anyone having examined the validity of the content delivered.

Qualiopi thus becomes, in some cases, more a question of budget than of professional excellence. That is precisely why it cannot constitute a sufficient selection criterion for a demanding healthcare professional.

What About the IBLCE® CERP System?

The IBLCE® Continuing Education Recognition Points (CERP) programme offers similar quality in form but not in substance. It also requires trainers to declare their interests.

But as IBLCE® states: the determination of CERP eligibility or CERP provider status does not mean that IBLCE® endorses or evaluates the quality of the training.

The CERP programme also relies on essentially administrative and procedural criteria: existence of a formalised programme, attendance records, credit categorisation (L-CERP, R-CERP, E-CERP), declaration of learning objectives. It is also fee-based. Its structural logic is, in this respect, very close to that of Qualiopi.

The CERP programme organises the traceability of IBCLCs' continuing professional development worldwide, and it requires coherence between declared content and IBCLC practice competency domains. But it says nothing about the validity of claims made during training, or the quality of cited sources.

We are therefore faced with this reality: at both national and international level, labelling systems do not validate the scientific content of lactation training. Labels validate procedures. The content itself remains entirely at the trainer's discretion.

A Confusion That Is Sometimes Deliberately Maintained

The problem is not the existence of these labels, which have genuine administrative utility. Qualiopi also enables training to be funded by OPCOs, which is not negligible. But given the cost of Qualiopi certification, certified trainings will de facto be significantly more expensive.

Yet one sometimes observes confusion about what Qualiopi certification is : a belief that it guarantees the scientific quality of content.

This drift is particularly concerning in a field where the production of pseudoscientific content is constantly expanding, where unsupported practices circulate freely among professionals, and where conflicts of interest with industry remain structural and often invisible.

What Criteria Should You Use Before Enrolling?

Administrative labels can feature among your selection criteria: they guarantee a minimum of organisational seriousness and, for Qualiopi, eligibility for financial support.

Here are other criteria that seem important to take into account:

On content:

Are the bibliographic references accessible before the training? Are they recent and from peer-reviewed journals?
Does the training clearly distinguish between validated recommendations, expert consensus, opinion, and unsupported emerging practice?
Is the level of evidence explicitly discussed, or are claims presented as unquestionable facts?

On the trainer:

What is their clinical training and certification in the relevant field?
Do they have declared conflicts of interest with industry or in the sale of a method or product? And if no conflict is declared, is this absence explicitly stated or simply silent?

On pedagogy:

Does the training develop critical thinking, or does it limit itself to transmitting closed protocols presented as self-evident?

Conclusion

Qualiopi and the IBLCE® CERP programme validate administrative processes — and Qualiopi enables funding through training bodies. But they do not guarantee the quality of training content or scientific rigour.

It therefore seems important to exercise critical judgement before enrolling in a training, exactly as one is supposed to do when reading a scientific article, a clinical recommendation or a commercial argument.

Lactasource is not Qualiopi-certified (we don't have the budget!) but is recognised under the IBLCE® CERP programme for certain trainings. We consider these recognitions as useful administrative frameworks, not as content validations, and we assume full editorial responsibility for what we teach, independently of any label. Every training offered on Lactasource is supported by a bibliography available on request by email and kept up to date. We declare the absence of any financial link with any company whose products or services could interfere with our content.