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02 May 2012

Summary of request

The Authority was asked for information about treatments carried out at HFEA licensed centres from 2007.

HFEA response

A large proportion of information requested is routinely published under the Authority’s Publication Scheme and can be found on the Authority’s website. Information about treatments at each clinic is available on the HFEA online clinic directory ‘Choose a fertility clinic’ (http://guide.hfea.gov.uk/guide/AllClinics.aspx?x=A) and each centre’s ID is available in our annual reports (http://www.hfea.gov.uk/146.html). As this information requested is reasonably accessible via the HFEA website, it is exempt from disclosure under section 21 FOIA.

With regards to the information requested about patient numbers, this is not already available and is provided in the attached documents. The information requested about IUI cycles for the years 2007 – 2010 is also not already available and is provided in the attached documents. Please note that IUI cycle data for 2011 is available on the HFEA online clinic directory ‘Choose a fertility clinic’. There are several points to note about the information in the attached tables:

- The information contained in the attached tables relating to patient numbers was extracted from the HFEA’s data warehouse containing Register data on 26/04/2012.
- A patient may be counted in more than one year and may have changed age category.
- Where less than 5 patients fall within a category the number has been replaced with * to protect identity.
- The clinic indicator referred to in the request is ‘IVF patients (own eggs)’ and to provide this information we have used the same definition of an IVF patient as used in ‘Choose a fertility clinic’, which should help comparison. This will therefore include patients undergoing stimulated cycles with own eggs, fresh and will exclude ICSI and other micromanipulation techniques, PGD cycles and unstimulated cycles.
- 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.  Live birth data up to 30 June 2010 and earlier outcomes up to 30 June 2011 have been subject to a preliminary verification process, and the centres that supplied the data have been asked to confirm their accuracy, for which they remain responsible.  
- The information contained in the attached tables relating to IUI cycles was taken from centres’ annual submission of IUI data (a different method of data collection to IVF data). The IUI information acquired through annual submissions and held in our database may be subject to change as licensed centres notify us of information that updates or corrects information they have previously supplied. 

• Release package 1 (350kb)
• Release package 2 (204kb)

I can see that you require a substantial amount of information for your research and you may be interested in looking at our web pages that set out two access routes for researcher to work with our data here: http://www.hfea.gov.uk/5447.html . One option is to access an anonymised data set (there is a user guide that lists the data fields available) and this is freely accessible to download. The other option covers access to a fuller dataset that is consequently treated as potentially identifying and therefore has a formal process for applying and granting access. 

 

Page last updated: 17 August 2012

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