Survey on funding

I've been on Channel Four News this morning, talking about the latest survey on funding for fertility which suggests that 80% of primary care trusts are not offering the treatment they should.

The website www.fundingforfertility.com has all the latest details on NHS funding for fertility treatment, and shows that your chances of getting treatment depend entirely on where you live. The system is blatantly unfair, with individual primary care trusts making up their own criteria. In some parts of the country, you only get treatment if you are over the age of 36, in others if you are under the age of 35.

Many are refusing to pay for spare embryos to be frozen and transferred, which means patients end up having more than one embryo transferred and the multiple birth rate rises. The cost to the NHS of more multiple births would far exceed the cost of freezing and transferring spare embryos, but there seems to be little in the way of joined up thinking on this issue.

There is little point in going to the expense of having a National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to look carefully at all aspects of a problem and make recommendations if primary care trusts are then free to ignore them entirely and make up their own rules.

You can see more of the Channel Four News coverage at www.channel4.com/news