I'm afraid I haven't been updating much this week, but I've just been finishing my new book, the companion to The Complete Guide to Female Fertility, which is due out next year. The first draft is completed, and I'll be back on track again now!
There has been some interesting coverage of the postcode lottery for IVF funding this week, after the Department of Health published their survey of local primary care trusts. All the trusts were questioned about what arrangements they had for funding IVF, and the majority are finally offering one cycle of treatment. The problem is that some invent such stringent criteria that it's virtually impossible to qualify, and others refuse to pay for freezing and transferring any frozen embryos, which doesn't really count as paying for an IVF cycle. It's great that people are finally taking notice of this, four years after the government's own advisory body, The National Institute for Clinical Excellence, said that anyone who needed it should get three funded cycles. There doesn't seem much point in having an advisory body if you ignore the advice it gives, but at least people are finally starting to take some notice of the problems fertility patients face. You can see details of the survey at here
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