The Dunedin event listed as the "NZ College of Midwives Conference 2026" is, on the College's own pages, the 12th Biennial Joan Donley Midwifery Research Forum, running 9-10 September 2026 at the Dunedin Town Hall. The College's Biennial National Conference does not run in 2026 at all — it next meets in Wellington in July 2027.
The event listed as the "NZ College of Midwives Conference 2026" in Dunedin is, on the organisation's own pages, the 12th Biennial Joan Donley Midwifery Research Forum, running Wednesday 9 and Thursday 10 September 2026 at the Dunedin Town Hall, Ōtepoti Dunedin. The listed city and venue are correct; the 1 October date is not.
The College's Biennial National Conference is a different event on a different cycle. Its own conference site states the next one is 22-23 July 2027 at Tākina in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, with pre-conference masterclasses on 21 July, following the 2025 edition in Kirikiriroa Hamilton. There is no New Zealand College of Midwives national conference in 2026.
The forum is run by the New Zealand College of Midwives | Te Kāreti o ngā Kaiwhakawhānau ki Aotearoa through the Joan Donley Midwifery Research Collaboration, with the College's Otago Region as host. The College describes the JDMRC, established in 2001, as the evidence arm of the College, providing the framework and secretarial support for its research programme.
It is named for Joan Donley, who the College records as a founding member of the New Zealand College of Midwives and of the New Zealand Home Birth Association, one of only three domiciliary midwives in the country after gaining her midwifery diploma in Auckland in the 1970s, and a recipient of the OBE in 1990. She was born in 1916 and died in 2005.
The College is headquartered at 376 Manchester Street, St Albans, Christchurch, and organises into ten regions spanning Northland to Southland. Its membership page lists professional and clinical advice, professional indemnity insurance cover, legal services, reduced Midwifery Standards Review fees and the quarterly Midwife Aotearoa among member entitlements. The College also sits alongside MERAS, its union arm, and the MMPO practice-management service.
Both of the College's major gatherings are genuinely biennial. This is the research forum's 12th biennial outing; the national conference, whose registration and enquiries are handled by conference partner Composition, alternates in the intervening years.
Midwives, midwifery students, educators and maternity researchers. The College describes the forum as an opportunity for midwives and others to share their research relating to midwifery and maternity care in Aotearoa, and calls it a key event for sharing innovation and shaping midwifery practice.
The published programme has been expanded this year because of the high number of abstracts received. It is single-stream, built from 10-minute and 3-minute presentations plus a poster display, and runs to roughly 40 oral presentations and seven posters across six sessions: Mātauranga, equity and access; Clinical practice; Tāpuhi hou: Education and graduate experiences; Innovation and transformation in midwifery; Sustainable midwifery practice; and Wairua, physiology and birth.
Day one opens with a whakatau and welcome at 9.00am and closes at 5.00pm, with the first presentation being "He Kahu Pōkai ahau" from Beatrice-Ann Leatham (Ngāti Porou) and a formal invitation to the 2027 conference from Violet Clapham late in the afternoon. Day two adds an optional 7.30am breakfast session on sustainable midwifery practice for registered delegates, and the forum closes at 12.30pm after the presentation of research awards and a closing address and karakia.
The research awards are new this year, with sponsorship confirmed from the College, Pasifika Midwives Aotearoa, the Liggins Institute, Otago Polytechnic and the Perinatal Society of New Zealand. The breakfast session is sponsored by Auckland University of Technology and the New Zealand Policy Research Institute. The Otago Region hosts a social event on the evening of day one at Pequeño Mixology on Princes Street, themed as a 1916 speakeasy — 1916 being the year Joan Donley was born. The College has not published a delegate number.
The Dunedin Centre sits at 1 Harrop Street on The Octagon, Dunedin's central plaza, and the building runs through an entire city block to Moray Place. It is a multi-purpose complex containing the Dunedin Town Hall, the Glenroy Auditorium and a set of smaller conference rooms.
Operator Dunedin Venues lists the Dunedin Town Hall at 664 square metres with a maximum capacity of 2,200, seating 2,145 theatre style, 1,000 for cocktails and 550 for a banquet. It has a permanent stage with extension options, backstage facilities comprising two soloist dressing rooms, a green room and a choral room, a barrel-vaulted coffered ceiling and the 1919 "Norma" organ. The Glenroy Auditorium seats around 400 and is pitched at medium-sized conferences. Conference Rooms 1 and 2 are adjacent, purpose-built for meetings and seminars and used for breakouts, listed at 147 square metres combined with a maximum capacity of 120, 110 theatre style, and accessible from both the Octagon and Harrop Street.
On distance, the organiser is explicit in its own delegate note: Dunedin Airport is 29km from the venue, with travel time of 30-45 minutes depending on traffic. That is a materially longer airport run than most New Zealand conference cities and is the single logistics fact delegates most need to plan around.
Delegate movement inside the event is simple by design. Because the programme is single-stream, all six sessions run sequentially in one room rather than splitting across concurrent tracks, so there is no inter-session churn between floors. Morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and the day-two breakfast session are all held at the venue. The Octagon location puts central-city accommodation and hospitality in the immediately surrounding blocks, and the day-one social event on Princes Street is on a street running directly off the Octagon.
The useful pattern here is the rotation. The College runs two biennial national gatherings on offset cycles, so its business-events footprint moves around the country every year rather than every second year — the research forum lands in Ōtepoti Dunedin in September 2026, and the national conference lands at Tākina in Wellington in July 2027. For a professional body of this size, that is effectively an annual national-catchment booking circulating between main and secondary centres.
For Dunedin specifically, this is a two-day September event with a national delegate catchment, an evening function and an early-morning breakfast session — a structure that all but requires overnight stays and pushes spend into the central city outside the summer peak. The five research bodies attached to the new awards, plus two tertiary sponsors on the breakfast session, indicate a sponsor base drawn from the university and research sector rather than pure trade exhibition.
There is also a scheduling detail worth noting for venues and PCOs: the call for abstracts for the 2027 Wellington conference opens in September 2026, the same month the Dunedin forum runs.
Cited links supporting this report.
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