The newly refurbished Christchurch Town Hall, which would have been the venue for the 2020 RANZCO NZ Branch meeting in May

New Zealand’s annual ophthalmology conference, the Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists (RANZCO) New Zealand Branch meeting, due to be held in Christchurch from 8-9 May, has been cancelled.

The announcement came hot on the heels of several other optometry and ophthalmology meeting cancellations in New Zealand, Australia and internationally, all hit by national governments’ desire to slow the spread of Covid-19 in their countries.

In a joint statement to delegates, sponsors, speakers and abstract contributors, Dr Logan Robinson, head of the 2020 RANZCO NZ organising committee, and Dr Peter Hadden, president of the RANZCO NZ Branch, said it with much regret that they had decided to cancel the 2020 meeting. “We plan instead to hold next year’s meeting in Christchurch and the one after that in Blenheim.”

Though the organising committee and its events’ organiser, Karen McLean of CML, were still working through all the logistics of the cancellation at the time of going to press, they stressed that all registration fees would be refunded.

RANZCO specialist meetings

Though many of the RANZCO branch meeting across Australasia have been cancelled, the College’s annual specialist meetings - the ANZ Eye Bank and Cornea Society, the ANZ Glaucoma Society and the ANZ Strabismus Society meetings - did take place in late February and are covered in the next few pages in place of our planned pre-RANZCO NZ special feature, together with some of the latest ophthalmology news from around the world.