F-2011-00145 - NHS funded treatment cycle outcomes

10 June 2011

Summary of request

The Authority was asked for the number of cycles and live births after NHS and Private treatment for 2008 and the first half of 2009. Also, information on which treatment cycle a live birth had been achieved on for the last five years.

HFEA response

Please see the attached file for the figures requested. Points to note regarding these figures that are set out here and within the files attached:

NHS and Private treatment:

The HFEA introduced new forms in October 2007 which included information on the funding source for the cycle.  The new forms were phased in by clinics so in 2008 some cycles (about 7%) were still reported on the old forms, without this information.  By 2009 this had gone right down to less than 1% of cycles.  The live birth rate per cycle is broadly similar between the two funding types, but great care should be taken when directly comparing results without looking at other differences between the two groups.  There may be ‘confounding variables’ affecting the success rates which are represented differently between the two groups.  Patient age and cycle number would be likely ones, but there may be other factors – such as BMI and smoking status – which we do not collect data on and so could not account for.  The private patient group is likely to include those who have already had several failed NHS cycles.

The figures for 2009 only represent the first half of the year, it would be wise to wait until we have the full year information for 2009 before concluding that the proportion of treatment which is NHS has changed.  

Treatment cycles to first live birth:

We included data for five full years, plus the first half of 2009.  We have only included figures for fresh cycles, when we looked closer at including frozen cycles it was clear that working through the number of permutations of fresh and frozen would have been prohibitively time consuming.   The data is presented by the year the patient’s first cycle took place in, her subsequent cycles may have taken place in later years but they are still kept together on the same line.   We have gone up to seven treatment cycles, although a few patients did have more than this within the time period, these were only very small numbers (you’ll see some have already been suppressed).  We have provided a live birth rate per cycle for most of the cycle numbers (partly to help us decide when to stop), however there may be other ways to present this in terms of ‘how many cycles does it take to have a live birth?’.

If you are aware of any plan to publish these figures in a future report we’d be very grateful if you let us know.  You are reminded that information disclosed in response to this request may be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.  The supply of documents under Freedom of Information does not give the person or organisation who receives them an automatic right to re-use the documents in a way that would infringe copyright, for example, by making multiple copies, publishing and issuing copies to the public.  Please refer to the guidance notes provided via the National Archives’ Information Management website for further details on copyright: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/freedom-of-information-publication-schemes.pdf  

The data was extracted from the HFEA’s data warehouse containing Register data provided by licensed centres as at 08/06/2011.  Please note that the information in our database may be subject to change as licensed centres notify us of information that updates or corrects information they have previously supplied.  Data up to 30/09/2010 (treatments) and 30/09/2009 (births) have been subject to a validation process, and the centres that supplied the data have been asked to confirm its accuracy, for which they remain responsible.

Page last updated: 16 August 2012