Professor Tracey Wade joins Sonder’s Board of Directors
Following an intensive recruitment process including responses from several high quality applicants, Sonder is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Tracey Wade to Sonder’s Board of Directors with effect 1 July 2021 as Board Appointed Director.
Professor Tracey Wade is the Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Flinders University. She has worked clinically in the area of eating disorders for 30 years and has been working full time as an academic since 1999.
Her current research interests are in the aetiology, prevention and treatment of eating disorders, with a focus on implementing this research into real world settings to improve outcomes in body image and eating disorders.
Professor Wade has co-written 3 therapy books and has over 200 publications in peer reviewed journals.
In 2015 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and in 2016 she was made an Inaugural Honorary Fellow of the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behaviour Therapy.
In 2017-18 she was the president of the Eating Disorder Research Society, and in 2018-2020 she was a member of the Million Minds Expert Advisory Panel. In 2019 she was appointed Fellow of the APS, and is currently an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Eating Disorders.
Professor Wade is the director of the Flinders University Services for Eating Disorders (FUSED) and the Blackbird Research Initiative.
She is a member of the National Eating Disorders Collaboration steering committee commissioned by the Federal Government to inform policy development in the area of eating disorder prevention and treatment, and a member of the Eating Disorders Technical Advisory Committee, advising the Federal Department of Health on matters related to eating disorders.
Addressing key gaps
A key strength of Sonder is our observance of strong clinical and practice governance protocols.
Our internal controls of both quality improvement and clinical governance were recently reviewed by Sonder’s Quality & Risk Executive Manager, Sarah Fraser.
The key gap that existed and which has now been addressed through the appointment of our new Board Appointed Director is to ensure that mental health service planning, delivery and evaluation is oversighted at the Board level.
The ownership of this risk and clinical governance by the Board is fundamental to allowing Sonder to expand its services into increasingly complex communities and into services that that overlap with acute and tertiary type services.
The Board is confident that in having selected one of South Australia’s finest academics, Professor Wade will enable us to sustain our growth and expansion through strong adherence to exemplary clinical and practice governance.