Associate Professor Sarah Wayland
Discipline Lead Social Work - Faculty of Medicine and Health; School of Health
Biography
Sarah Wayland is Associate Professor and Discipline Lead Social Work in the School of Health at the University of New England based at UNE Metro, New South Wales, Australia. Sarah is also a Senior Research Fellow for Manna Institute.
For more than 25 years, Dr Wayland’s frontline work and research has focused on trauma and loss, with a particular emphasis on understanding the needs of missing people, their families as well as suicide bereavement, postvention and prevention. Dr Wayland is involved in several projects examining workforce responses to suicide attempting, trauma exposure and the needs of carers. Including evaluation of mental health services. Dr Wayland’s focus, in partnership with Professor Myfanwy Maple, remains on authentically including the voices of those with lived experience to better inform suicide policy, research and practice developments. She is a regular speaker, to mainstream media, about the impacts of being left behind when a person is missing as well as conversations about grief and community responses to loss.
Qualifications
PhD, BSW
Teaching Areas
- Social Work
- Social Work Honours
- Mental Health
- Research Methods
- Suicide prevention
- Disability and Aging
Primary Research Area/s
Suicide prevention; Missing persons; Trauma; WorkforceResearch Interests
- Missing people – returned people, police workforce needs, media representation
- Suicide (prevention, intervention and postvention)
- Mental health and illness
- Family and community contexts
- Qualitative methods, in particular, narrative inquiry.
Research Supervision Experience
Sarah is currently supervising PhD, and Bachelor (Hons) students in areas related to her own research, including suicide within families, missing people, disability, and justice health. She specialises in supervising research using narrative inquiry methodology as well as broader qualitative health research methods.
