ICC Wales will
host the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Congress June
2024.
The five-day event is
expected to welcome more than 2,000 delegates and boost the local economy by
£5.8m with attendees from across the UK seeking accommodation in hotels across
Newport and Cardiff.
The Congress will take
exclusive use of ICC Wales with its sister venue at Celtic
Manor Resort supporting by providing
accommodation, meeting spaces for fringe events and by hosting the event’s main
dinner.
The announcement that
the 2024 event will take place at ICC Wales from June 2-6 strengthens Wales’s
status as a destination for healthcare meetings and business events in general,
with the RCN previously holding its Congress in major UK cities including
Brighton, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Belfast.
ICC
Wales chief executive Ian Edwards said: “We’re excited to
be the first Welsh venue to host the Royal College of Nursing Congress next
spring. This event is one of the largest and most important association
conferences in the UK and it was right at the top of our target list when we
launched the ICC Wales venue in 2019.
“Bringing
it here so quickly, when you consider the closures caused by Covid, is a
fantastic endorsement of the exceptional and expansive facilities we have at
ICC Wales, and the trust that event organisers place in our dedicated team.
“The
economic impact calculations also underline the benefits that these big
conferences bring to the visitor economy in Wales with the event’s
accommodation requirements being met by not just our venues within the Celtic
Collection, but also by hotels across the cities of Newport and Cardiff.”
The RCN
Congress is the
latest in a series of large-scale healthcare events due to take place at ICC
Wales in the coming year, including The British Renal
Society’s UK Kidney Week and the British Elbow & Shoulder Society annual
meeting in June, The British Society of Echocardiography’s conference in
October; The UK Oncology Nursing Society (UKONS) and the British Society of
Interventional Radiology annual meetings, which will both take place in
November.
The venue has also
confirmed medical events for 2024 including the Society of Cardiothoracic
Surgery of Great Britain and Ireland’s annual meeting in March, the Royal
College of Emergency Medicine’s Spring Conference in April, and the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland’s (ACPGBI)
annual meeting in June and July.
