NHS IVF Treatment Postcode Lottery System Failing UK Couples

(Newswire.net — November 3, 2014) Alicante, Alicante — 

 

The Independent has just published that the National Institute for Health and Social Care have highlighted on the fact that the NHS are obliged to provide women under 40 who have failed to get pregnant after two years of trying with a complete three cycles of IVF treatment, whereas in reality less than one in five local NHS funding bodies are able to offer couples in their area the complete number of cycles, what the national health watchdog has declared as an IVF treatment postcode lottery.

 

 

Despite funding pressures on the NHS, a national health watchdog representative Professor Gillian Leng says that infertility could have a potentially devastating effect on UK couples and that the NHS should consider IVF treatment as a core service, and saying that it’s just not acceptable that some parts of the UK were choosing to ignore the watchdog’s recommendations for treating couples with infertility problems, claiming that the postcode lottery system was creating inequalities in healthcare across the UK.”

 

The IVF experts said that current NHS funding was having a serious impact on those UK couples who were not able to afford IVF treatment privately. The report discloses that one in seven heterosexual couples are affected by infertility in the UK, and with such long waiting lists many people were now looking abroad for IVF treatment, which in many cases in much less costly too. According to an official spokesperson from fertility clinic IVF-Spain, one country that doesn’t have a postcode lottery system for IVF treatment is Spain, and subsequently becoming a very popular destination for UK couples who can’t afford costly IVF treatment at home.

 

The spokesman said that UK couples say themselves that the system is all wrong in the UK. He said… “Quite a large percentage of our clients do come from the UK, who tell us they didn’t just chose Spain because of the long waiting lists at UK private IVF clinics, but also because of having to give up on the NHS as their first option due to never knowing whether it would actually ever happen”. He also said that IVF-Spain also offered much less costly IVF treatment compared to the UK, that language problems were not an issue, and most important of all for couples to know was that IVF-Spain pregnancy success rates are above the Spanish average.

 

He finished by saying that according to women wanting to get pregnant from the UK, they had chosen the IVF-Spain fertility clinic as it offers a range of fertility treatments like Ovulation Induction (OI), in Vitro fertilisation (IVF), and Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI). IVF-Spain also provides their patients with a selection of donation services including egg, sperm and embryo donation, some of which are not available in the UK.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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