Introduction by Croakey: Later this week, more than 1,000 health professionals will head to the city of Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand, to take part in the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists’ (RANZCR) annual scientific meeting.
RANZCR has a broad remit and a reach well beyond the two countries in its title. Speakers and delegates from all around the world will be at the Meeting, with a packed program covering the latest in clinical radiology, radiotherapy, and interventional radiology and neuroradiology.
As Marie McInerney discovered in speaking to some of the convenors for the Croakey Conference News Service, the gathering will also have at its heart a focus on community, culture and equity, and an understanding that healthcare is a collective activity involving communication, understanding and partnership within, between and beyond all its disciplines.
#RANZCR2026 also takes place as the host nation prepares for an election. You’ll be able to read more news from that, and further highlights from the conference, as part of our ongoing coverage of #RANZCR2026.
Marie McInerney writes:
Dr Anthony Butler, a radiology professor in Aotearoa New Zealand, was deeply impressed a few years ago by a presentation at an international radiology conference that highlighted the needs of a Navajo community in the United States, and explained how “technology innovation in radiology should be used to improve health equity”.
The presentation by Harvard Professor Dr Rajiv (Raj) Gupta, Vice Chair of Clinical Operations in the Department of Radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, “really struck home to me”, Butler recently told Croakey.
“Often I’ve sat in radiology conferences listening to experts from prestigious institutes presenting on high end applications, niche technologies, and health innovation that only the rich will ever benefit from,” he said.
“Whereas Raj was from two of the most prestigious institutes in the world and was focusing his research skills on improving equity in radiology in order to deliver healthcare to rural Native American communities, as opposed to bringing it to Manhattan.”
That encounter led to the decision to invite Gupta address to this week’s Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists’ (RANZCR) annual scientific meeting in Aotearoa New Zealand.
It also helped fuel the strong focus on community, culture and equity that its six convenors say is at the heart of the three-day trans-Tasman meeting (#RANZCR2026), to be held in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Better together
The event will also focus strongly on workforce capacity and culture, and cutting-edge clinical practice, under the theme: Better Together, He waka eke noa — we are all in this together.
The theme will be highlighted across multiple presentations, including plenary sessions that will reflect on the responses to two massive disasters experienced by the host city: the 2019 massacre by an Australian man of 51 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques, and the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, which caused 185 deaths and nearly 7,000 major injuries.
Sessions will also recognise the importance of multi-disciplinary care, as well as the latest clinical advances in radiology’s three main fields: clinical radiology, radiation oncology, and interventional radiology and neuroradiology.
The aim, says convenor and abdominal radiologist Dr Verity Wood, is “to recognise the collective spirit that is involved in healthcare”.
“By better communication, understanding and partnership we can provide better care for our patients,” Wood said.
Global interest
The program and location have sparked strong international interest in the conference, which has attracted many leading practitioners from Asia, the UK, Europe and the United States, bolstered by strong connections between the fields’ international bodies.
It will be the largest ASM held by RANZCR in Aotearoa New Zealand, with more than 1,000 delegates registered, more than 100 speakers, including 45 international speakers, 13 international college presidents and representatives, and 100-plus sessions delivered across 10-11 scientific streams.
This will, RANZCR said, create opportunities to explore global perspectives on:
- The future of cancer diagnosis and treatment
- Workforce sustainability and specialist training
- Access to diagnostic imaging and cancer services
- Leadership, wellbeing, and workplace culture
- Sustainability in healthcare
- Innovation and health system reform
- Multidisciplinary collaboration and its impact on patient outcomes
- AI and emerging healthcare technologies (following a dedicated conference on AI hosted by RANZCR in Sydney earlier this year – see Croakey’s coverage from that here.)
Policy priorities
While not an explicit focus in the program, #RANZCR2026 will be held just over a week before Aotearoa New Zealand’s national election on 7 November, which is being contested by the governing National Party, the Labour Opposition and a number of smaller parties.
RANZCR’s election priorities statement raises four main asks:
- Safe and effective use of artificial intelligence in medical imaging and radiation oncology through the passing of a delayed Medical Products Bill as an early priority, with interim safeguards until it takes effect.
- Connected digital infrastructure that lets patients’ information follow them across the system, with the radiology and cancer workstreams of the ten year national Health Digital Investment Plan accelerated and fully funded.
- A permanent, sustainable funding model for maternity ultrasound, so that cost is never a barrier to a safe pregnancy.
- Major and urgent investment in linear accelerator capacity to ensure cancer treatment and imaging infrastructure keeps pace with demand.
There is also much else at stake for health and healthcare in the national poll, which Croakey will examine in more detail ahead of the election.
That will include concerns in Aotearoa New Zealand that the centre-right National Government has been dismantling Māori rights and protections, by weakening Te Tiriti o Waitangi —the Treaty of Waitangi and scrapping the Māori Health Authority.
First Nations focus
RANZCR2026 will have a strong focus on issues for Māori and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and healthcare, kicked off with a presentation on cultural safety by Professor Suzanne Pitama (Ngāti Kahungunu), who is an educational psychologist.
Pitama is head of faculty at the University of Otago Faculty of Medicine and a member of the New Zealand Psychological Society Rōpū Mātai Hinengaro o Aotearoa (NZPsS).
The NZPsS, alongside, the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists (NZCCP), this month formally apologised to Māori for the harm caused by racism within their discipline.
Following Pitama’s address, RANZCR’s Māori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Empowerment Committee (MATEC) will host a session that will showcase, among other initiatives, the work of the Mātai Medical Research Institute in remote Tairāwhiti Gisborne, on the east coast of the north island.
The centre was set up in 2019 explicitly to improve health outcomes for Māori and regional communities. There is global interest in its work, which includes the development of a new MRI scanning method, which may be able to detect subtle brain lesions in multiple sclerosis patients not seen on current scans.
Bending perspectives
Dr Verity Wood said the convenors are pleased that several “perspective-bending topics” will shape the first day of #RANZCR2026, which will look at “the bigger picture stuff that we are all involved in and responsible for as radiologists”, including working as teams and managing pressure.
The day’s focus, she said, will be “about how we work as a profession, how we interact with our community, with other doctors and with each other ….[as well as] looking at how we react and respond to changes in technology and [the[ environments that we work in”.
That will include looking at performance-related issues such as dealing with stress, and questions of fairness, which are relevant to the three RANZCR specialties, trainees and interested allied and other health professionals, fellow convenor, radiation oncologist Dr Feng-yi Soh told Croakey.
“We want our attendees to not only take away a lot of technical know-how, and the latest evidence in our respective subspecialties, but also to consider general knowledge and values that are important to practising in medicine in the current environment in both Australia and New Zealand, and also in our own specialties,” he said.
The event will be officially opened by Mark Darrow, the chair of Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora.
The annual RANZCR Nisbet Oration will be delivered by Nathan Fa’avae, one of New Zealand’s most experienced adventure athletes, who will talk about how to enable people and teams to perform at their best whether in sport, health or business.
Christchurch hepatobiliary surgeon Dr Saxon Connor will speak in two sessions about fairness and working under pressure, drawing from his experiences of working through Christchurch’s traumatic earthquake and terrorist events.
Improving outcomes
Wood said the first day will also aim to “poke some bears” with a debate on whether teleradiology is “parasite or symbiote” and a light-hearted take from UK radiology expert, Dr Giles Maskell, on “whether happiness at work is even possible these days”.
Maskell is a consultant radiologist and former President of the Royal College of Radiologists, who has a particular interest in radiological error – “the perceptual, cognitive and cultural reasons behind it and strategies for preventing or reducing it”.
He has just retired as clinical lead for the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) radiology workstream, an improvement programme in the UK National Health Service.
The following days at #RANZCR2026 will focus on clinical innovation, delivery and excellence, diving into the “deep nitty gritty” of radiology research and practice, as well as other big picture topics, including sustainability considerations, given how energy-hungry radiology is.
Along with five other international speakers, Dr Raj Gupta will bring expertise in photon-counting computed tomography (PCCT), an exciting new form of x-ray imaging that measures x-ray beams one photon at a time to give better and clearer pictures – “the first new way to measure x-rays in nearly 100 years,” Butler told Croakey in a brief email exchange.
Gupta wrote that, while high-end, high-cost PCCT scanners are gaining acceptance in large tertiary care hospitals in busy urban areas, “a vast number of patients in rural or geographically widespread regions need a point-of-care version of this technology”. That’s something his institution has pioneered, he wrote.
Among eminent global radiation oncologists speaking at the conference, Soh highlighted the United Kingdom’s Professor Ananya Choudhury, whose work centres on improving outcomes through translational research, including radiotherapy innovation.
Soh said Choudhury is also committed to mentoring trainees from around the world, and fostering multidisciplinary collaboration in genitourinary oncology. Her presentation will help conference participants to “think out of the box and about ways of collaborating and funding trials,” he said.
Interventional radiology will also have a strong program at the conference, as it moves towards formal recognition as a clinical specialty.
Dr Jin Woo Choi, a Clinical Associate Professor of Radiology at the Seoul National University College of Medicine, will share his extensive experiences in Y-90 resin microspheres, a minimally invasive treatment for inoperable liver tumours.
The convenor for this session, Dr Hyukjoon (Howard) Lee, said the treatment is currently undergoing a feasibility test in Auckland but is expected to be rolled out nationally in Aotearoa New Zealand soon.
Lee is also looking forward to hearing from Professor Romaric Loffroy, originally from the University of Dijon School of Medicine in France, who is an expert in the use of N-butyl cyanoacrylate glue as a specific embolic material. Loffroy has described the glue as “the most misunderstood hero in interventional radiology”.
Lee said the sessions will involve health professionals from other fields, including a specialist hepatopancreatobiliary surgeon and a gastroenterologist, to open up multi-disciplinary perspectives for those attending.
“My aim is to give the audience, especially the trainees, a wider perspective because sometimes we can just get focused on the imaging or procedures,” he said.
“By inviting clinicians we get to see the whole disease and the clinical patterns throughout the patient care.”
Bookmark this link to follow Croakey Conference News Service’s coverage of #RACMA2026.
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