Wednesday, 23 November 2011

IVF blunders


It's every IVF patient's worst nightmare - to discover that something has happened to the precious eggs,sperm or embryos that you have left at the fertility clinic. The news that a couple from Wales had lost all their donated eggs after an accident at the clinic is heartbreaking - the highs and lows of infertility are hard enough to cope with and it is hard to imagine how utterly devastating this news must have been.

The despair of the couple must also have been felt by the member of staff responsible - can you imagine how awful it would be to know that you might have ruined a couple's only chance to have a baby? It was clearly a mistake, and human error is something we can't ever eliminate entirely, What's really worrying about this story though is that it happened at the same clinic where we recently learnt that stored sperm was mistakenly destroyed. It may be an unfortunate coincidence, but fertility patients will be rightly anxious about entrusting their precious gametes to a clinic which seems to have a less than perfect record on this front. One can only hope that all procedures at the clinic have been reviewed to minimise the chances of anything like these two incidents happening again.

No comments:

Post a Comment