EINZ Conference 2026

EINZ started in Queenstown in 2022 with a simple idea: what if a conference about critical care was actually enjoyable? Not just the evenings — the whole thing. Talks you want to stay awake for, speakers who stick around to argue at the bar, and a crowd of people who genuinely care about the same problems you do.

Through its early conferences, EINZ contributed to the development of a national collaborative network that has enabled on-site ECMO capability across all cardiac centres in New Zealand — a tangible, concrete outcome that came directly from the kind of conversations this conference makes possible.

Despite rapid global expansion of MCS, patient outcomes have changed little over the past decade. EINZ exists to challenge that trajectory — through innovative, unconventional, evidence-informed approaches to research, governance, and training, and by actively reducing bias in decision-making by bringing together expertise from genuinely diverse high-performance fields. Not just medicine.

"A New Hope" reflects exactly this ambition: redefining what success looks like, exploring technologies and systems of care that most conferences would not yet touch, and building the kind of global collaborations that outlast any single event. This edition will include the international showcase of a technology, developed in collaboration with our international research partners, that we believe will fundamentally change what is possible in cardiac transplantation. We are not ready to say more just yet. But you will want to be in the room.

Three days in Queenstown. World-class faculty. Real conversations. And yes — a lakeside dinner, some memorable social events, and the kind of connections that keep showing up in your working life for years.