NZ Hip Fest 2026 confirmed for JW Marriott Auckland, 17-18 September, in registry's first two-day New Zealand meeting

New Zealand Hip Fest 2026 will be held at the JW Marriott Auckland on Thursday 17 and Friday 18 September 2026, according to the event page published by the Australian and New Zealand Hip Fracture Registry (ANZHFR). Day one runs from 1.00pm to 5.00pm with registration from 12.30pm, followed by a welcome drinks reception from 5.00pm to 6.30pm. Day two runs from 9.00am to 3.00pm with registration from 8.30am. The registry lists the venue as the JW Marriott Hotel, 22/26 Albert Street, Auckland CBD, using the Ballroom and the adjoining Griffin Room. Registration is handled through TryBooking, whose listing describes the meeting as "a free two-day health education conference for those involved in the ANZ Hip Fracture Registry and caring for patients with fractured hips", and confirms 2026 as the first two-day edition of the New Zealand event.

Who runs it

The controlling body is the Australian and New Zealand Hip Fracture Registry, a bi-national clinical quality registry that collects data on people aged over 50 admitted to a participating hospital with a hip fracture. On its own pages the registry states it began in 2014 and reports against the seven areas of care set out in the Hip Fracture Care Clinical Care Standard. It is hosted by the Falls, Balance and Injury Research Centre at Neuroscience Research Australia, a medical research institute affiliated with the UNSW Sydney Faculty of Medicine, and in New Zealand it is supported by the New Zealand Orthopaedic Association. Funding is listed as coming from the Accident Compensation Corporation in New Zealand and from Australian federal and state health departments.

Governance sits with a steering group co-chaired by a geriatrician and an orthopaedic surgeon, currently Professor Jacqueline Close AM and Associate Professor Chris Wall, with seats held by nominees of the New Zealand Orthopaedic Association, the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, the Australian and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine, Osteoporosis New Zealand and a dozen other partner bodies. That structure is the reason Hip Fest is genuinely multidisciplinary rather than a single-college meeting.

The New Zealand event is organised annually by Dr Sarah Hurring, the registry's New Zealand clinical lead and a geriatrician at Burwood Hospital, and Nicola Ward, the New Zealand Hip Fracture Registry national coordinator, who is based at the New Zealand Orthopaedic Association. Ward is the named contact for the 2026 meeting.

Who it is for, and the programme

The published programme states plainly who should attend: clinicians and support staff, health and hospital executives, anyone involved in providing care to older people who have broken a hip, and staff who work with the registry. In practice that means orthopaedic surgeons, orthogeriatricians and physicians, anaesthetists, orthopaedic and clinical nurse specialists, physiotherapists, fracture liaison service staff, audit and data coordinators, and ambulance clinicians.

Day one is built around three hospital-team case studies with panel discussion: management of the frail and medically unwell patient, led by the North Shore Hospital team; optimising pain management for a palliative care patient and supporting family, led by the Auckland City Hospital team; and addressing resource constraint using registry data, led by the Middlemore Hospital team. A consumer story is delivered by video. The afternoon closes with the 2026 Golden Hip Awards for New Zealand, presented by Dr Maree Todd, president of the New Zealand arm of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine. The awards recognise best overall performance and most improved performance against the Hip Fracture Care Clinical Care Standard; in 2025 those went to North Shore Hospital and Nelson Hospital respectively.

Day two carries the theme "Meet the Experts" and tracks the patient journey end to end. Speakers listed include paramedic Chrissy Nicholson and clinical improvement lead Lianne Pepperell of Hato Hone St John on pre-hospital response and falls prevention; Middlemore anaesthetist Dr Grant Hounsell on analgesia; Dr Himali Aickin of Auckland City Hospital on a pain audit; orthopaedic surgeon Mr Mark Wright on fracture type and surgical decision-making; Dr Matthew Johnston of Palmerston North Hospital on frailty; Dr Min Yee Seow of North Shore Hospital on a frailty audit; physiotherapist Kyleigh Pailman on rehabilitation; endocrinologist Dr David Kim of Waitematā on osteoporosis treatment; and Jack Saju of the Taranaki fracture liaison service. The day closes with the release of the ANZHFR Annual Report 2026 and registry updates. There is no call for abstracts; the format is invited presentations, hospital-team panels and audit reporting rather than free papers.

Venue, movement and accommodation

The JW Marriott Auckland sits on Albert Street in the central business district, a short walk from Commercial Bay, the Britomart precinct and the Viaduct. The hotel has a long history under other names: it operated for years as the Stamford Plaza Auckland and, when it opened in 1984, as The Regent, the city's first five-star hotel. It took the JW Marriott flag after a major refurbishment, so directory records and older delegate memory may still carry the previous names for the same 22-26 Albert Street address.

Because the venue is the accommodation, delegate movement is minimal: the organisers have arranged a delegate booking link for in-house rooms, and the welcome reception is held in the Griffin Room immediately adjacent to the main event space. For those staying elsewhere, Albert Street is at the centre of the CBD's largest hotel cluster, with several hundred rooms within a few blocks. Auckland Airport is roughly 21 kilometres south of the CBD, with the AirportLink bus connecting to the rail network and Puhinui Station; the hotel offers parking and there are public parking buildings nearby, which matters for the significant share of delegates who will drive in from Waikato, Northland and Bay of Plenty hospitals.

Why it matters in NZ MICE

Hip Fest is a small meeting with an outsized profile in the medical association calendar. Attendance in Wellington in 2025 was 105, described by the organisers as their largest education day to date; the move to a two-day format in Auckland is a deliberate expansion. It is a clean example of the domestic association segment that fills New Zealand's mid-size city-hotel ballrooms: free to attend, funded through a registry and its partners rather than delegate fees, drawing multidisciplinary hospital teams from across the motu, and generating a reliable one- to two-night CBD room block plus catering and an evening function. Auckland also picks up the meeting on rotation after Wellington, which is the pattern that keeps this kind of business circulating between the main centres rather than settling permanently in one.

Delegates should note the New Zealand event is distinct from the ANZHFR Binational Hip Fest 2026, a separate meeting scheduled for 5-6 November 2026 at Rydges South Bank in Brisbane.