an interview later...

I've just done an interview for LBC radio about IVF funding, which they'd linked to Robert Edwards getting the Nobel prize. It's such a shame that on the day one of our country's greatest scientists gets awarded for his ground-breaking work, we end up discussing how to cut all funding for an amazing treatment that was invented here. We carry out less fertility treatment in the UK, and considerably less funded treatment, than most of the rest of Europe - and yet this was a field in which we once led the world.

It always fascinates me when I do these interviews that there is a general assumption that the NHS is funding huge amounts of treatment at the moment, when in fact that isn't the case at all. It's a tiny percentage of the NHS budget and cutting it would cause such distress. Today the person interviewing me equated IVF with breast-enlargement operations for teenagers - it seems to get worse by the day...