BWT RITCHIE SCHOLARSHIP

ANZAEC administers the BWT Ritchie Anaesthesia Scholarship and each year may award one or more (or no) scholarships.

The purpose of the scholarship is to assist New Zealand-based anaesthesia trainees who have passed the final examination for fellowship of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) and are eligible to proceed to training year 5, to gain overseas experience and bring it back to New Zealand. It is also open to those who wish to undertake a further year of study outside New Zealand in the year following completion of their ANZCA fellowship (FANZCA); and to anaesthetists with FANZCA who are also training in pain medicine or intensive care medicine and who have reached a similar stage for those fellowships. This criteria has been widened to include New Zealand based experience where deemed exceptional and worthy of scholarship.  Applicants must be nominated and supported by their training departments. 

The scholarship is named for Dr B W T Ritchie​, a New Zealand-born, UK-qualified anaesthetist who set up the BWT Ritchie Scholarship in 1991, with gift to a trust for that purpose – the capital to be retained with the net income to be used to fund the scholarships. The trust deed establishing the scholarship stipulates that the grant is intended to enable overseas experience but with the scholar expected to return to New Zealand for at least three years to work in anaesthesia or intensive care (which was not then a separate college). That now also applies to pain medicine.