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20 February 2012

Summary of request

The Authority was asked for the age breakdown of the 3,439 women who received fertility treatment in Scotland in 2010 (reference: Table 1 of the publication ‘Fertility treatment in 2010 - trends and figures’). Also, the age of the oldest person and youngest person who received fertility treatment in Scotland in 2010.

HFEA response

HFEA statistical publications use a standard set of age bands to present data. The attached document contains a breakdown of patients receiving fertility treatment in Scotland during 2010 using these age bands. Please note that the HFEA licenses two types of fertility treatment, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and donor insemination (DI), it does not hold data about treatment involving partner insemination. The reason for grouping patients into age bands is to avoid the release of small numbers (less than 5) and potential inadvertent disclosure of identifying information. Despite this, sometimes groups are still small and where these are less than 5 they have been replaced with an asterisk in the attached document. For the same reason we are not providing the age of the oldest and youngest patients who received fertility treatment in Scotland during 2010. This piece of information requested constitutes ‘sensitive personal data’ within the meaning given in section 2 of the Data Protection Act 1998 (‘DPA’).  It is therefore exempt from disclosure under sections 40(2) and 40(3)(a)(i) of the FOIA.  It is the Authority’s opinion that disclosure of such information would be in breach of the first data protection principle (fair and lawful processing) as set out in Schedule 1 to the DPA since none of the conditions set out in Schedule 2 to the DPA is met.

• Release package (168kb)

Please note the following points regarding the data in the attached document:

- This information was extracted from the HFEA’s data warehouse containing Register data on 17/02/2012. 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. Cycle data up to 31 December 2010 have been subject to a verification process, and the centres that supplied the data have been asked to confirm their accuracy, for which they remain responsible.

- If a patient had several treatment cycles during 2010 (be they IVF, DI or a mixture) the figures attached relate to their age at the time of their first treatment that year.

- The figure of 3439 quoted in the request for data is arrived at by the sum of the columns 'IVF' and 'DI' which gives a total of 3440. As indicated above, the HFEA dataset can change as clinics update their information submitted to the HFEA and is the expected reason for the difference of 1 here.

- The sum of column ‘Both IVF and DI’ is smaller than the combined sum of columns ‘IVF’ and ‘DI’. This is because some patients may have received both IVF and DI cycles during 2010 and will therefore be counted in both the columns ‘IVF’ and ‘DI’ but only once in the column ‘Both IVF and DI’.

Page last updated: 17 August 2012

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