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Choose a fertility clinic

A great fertility clinic isn’t just one that can give you effective treatment, it’s one with compassionate staff, clear pricing, seamless administrative processes and exceptional emotional support. Find out more about how to choose a clinic, preparing for your appointment and what to do if something goes wrong.

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How to choose a clinic

If you’re paying for treatment yourself you’ll want to make sure you’re choosing the right clinic, but with so many to choose from deciding which one best meets your needs can feel a bit overwhelming.

It may be tempting to rely solely on success rates but the reality is that most clinics are broadly all as good as each other – small differences in rates are usually down to the different types of patients treated.

Finding out how other patients and our inspectors rate the clinic, the clinic’s opening hours and location and whether they have a female doctor could all be equally important factors to consider.

Find out more about what to look for in a clinic

Data we publish

We collect data from fertility clinics and publish much of it on our website, including individual clinic success rates.

Individual clinic rates can't tell you how likely you are to have a baby. Look instead at the national rate on Choose a Fertility Clinic or visit our research and data page for the latest statistics.

Using the data on our website you can view the success rates for different clinics safe in the knowledge that they’ve been calculated in exactly the same way. Please note, we don’t publish figures for clinics performing very small numbers of cycles as the results can be misleading.

If you're looking for clinic data, head to the bottom of this page to search for a clinic and view: how inspectors rate the clinic; how patients rate the clinic; pregnancy and birth rates from different fertility treatments, multiple birth rates and waiting times for donated eggs, sperm or embryos.

We look after data from clinics about patients and treatments very carefully.

How we manage your data

Consent to treatment

Giving your informed consent is a vital part of your treatment. It affects how long you can store your embryos for, what happens in the event of your death and, in some cases, who's considered to be a legal parent to your child.

Find out more about Consent to treatment

Your wellbeing

Every licensed clinic is required by law to give you the chance to receive counselling. Find out more about how to look after your wellbeing and find support groups.

Find out more about Your wellbeing

Problems at the clinic

Thankfully it's rare that patients have serious problems with their clinic. However, if your clinic makes a mistake, you have a complaint or you want to change clinics, you can find out more about handling problems on this page.

Find out more about Problems at the clinic

Costs and funding

Not everyone is eligible to have treatment on the NHS. If you're having treatment privately costs can vary considerably so it's worth shopping around. Find out more about costs and funding.

Find out more about Costs and funding

By choosing a clinic on our website you can view treatments, opening hours, patient ratings, success rates and more all in one place. Plus every clinic is licensed so you know they’re safe too.

Why are there different success rates?

There are different ways of presenting success, typically births per embryo transferred, births per egg collection, and births per cycle of treatment. You can find all three measures for each licensed clinic on the Choose a Fertility Clinic section of our website.

All of these measures have their pros and cons and your clinic might use any or all of them. We show births per embryo transferred and births per egg collection against some key indicators for each clinic because we believe they provide the appropriate measure of a clinic’s practices and success.

For greater detail on the overall clinic performance in the various age groups you can click through to the detailed statistics page to see both pregnancy and birth rates per cycle of treatment and per embryo transferred.

Remember, whichever measure you focus on it can’t tell you your individual measure of success (only your doctor can do that); but each measure does give you a fair overall view of the clinic’s performance.

The trouble with comparing success rates

It’s extremely difficult to compare clinic success rates fairly. This is because success rates depend on the patients being treated and the reason for their infertility.

In addition, some clinics specialise in treating people with certain types of infertility or older women who are less likely to be successful, which will impact on their rate. That’s why we recommend you consider all the issues that matter to you – from opening hours to counselling provision – when choosing a clinic and not rely solely on the data.

 

Making sense of reliability ranges

When we present a clinic’s success rates, we also present what we call a ‘reliability range.’ The reliability range is designed to show how confident we are that a clinic will repeat their success rates in the future – generally the larger the clinic, the more confident we can be and the narrower the range is. This is because if a clinic has performed a large number of cycles then chance events won’t have a big impact on their overall success rate. However, the success rates of small clinics could change dramatically if they had just 10 more successes or failures. We therefore use the reliability range to show you the range of possible success rates a clinic might have in the future.

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Ready?

Use our Choose a Fertility Clinic service to find the clinic that’s right for you. If you’re an NHS patient, use it to research the clinic you’ll be having treatment at.

 

Choose a Fertility Clinic is the only tool that publishes comparable information about all fertility clinics in the UK. That’s because we collect data from clinics about all the treatments they carry out. And we inspect each clinic at least every two years to check their standards.

 

 

 

Choose a Fertility Clinic

Publication date: 1 September 2023

Review date: 1 September 2025