Eating Disorders Named a National Priority, with TrEAT Recognised in New National Report
A new national prioritisation by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has identified mental health and substance use disorders as the highest-ranked priority domain for Clinical Quality Registry (CQR) development in Australia. Importantly for our field, eating disorders are specifically identified as a priority condition within this domain.
Clinical Quality Registries play an important role in improving healthcare by systematically collecting information about the care people receive and the outcomes they experience. This creates a stronger practice-based evidence base, allowing services and clinicians to understand what is working, identify variation in care and support continuous quality improvement.
Despite mental health now being identified as Australia’s highest priority area for CQR development, registry infrastructure across the sector remains limited. The national prioritisation therefore represents an important opportunity to strengthen the data infrastructure available for mental health care, including eating disorder treatment.
The report also specifically recognises TrEAT as part of the emerging Clinical Quality Registry infrastructure in this area, noting identifiable clinical leadership in eating disorders.
This recognition is particularly meaningful for TrEAT. Since 2016, our work has focused on establishing the infrastructure needed to collect meaningful, real-world information about eating disorder treatment and outcomes. By bringing together data across services and settings, TrEAT aims to help clinicians and services understand how care is being delivered, what is working for different people and where there are opportunities to improve
For people receiving treatment, better data ultimately means a stronger foundation for better care. For clinicians and services, it creates opportunities to benchmark, learn and improve. For researchers and the wider sector, it provides an important source of practice-based evidence about eating disorder treatment as it occurs in the real world.
The identification of eating disorders as a national priority, alongside the recognition of TrEAT, is an important step forward for the field. It reinforces the need for coordinated, high-quality registry infrastructure and provides further momentum for building a stronger national evidence base to improve eating disorder treatment and outcomes.
Read the full report here: prioritised-clinical-domains-for-clinical-quality-registry-cqr-development-2026.pdf