Biomedical imaging technologies, professional and lay visions

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New publication on navigating IVF funding in the UK

A new publication is out in the journal Health & Place. The article is entitled Blurring the divide: Navigating the public/private landscape of fertility treatment in the UK and it is freely available here.

In this article, we draw on interviews with IVF patients and their partners to explore how the boundaries between public (NHS) and private fertility treatment provision are increasingly blurred. 

Key article highlights:

  • UK healthcare privatisation has had profound consequences for fertility patients
  • Fertility patients navigate hybrid public/private treatment arrangements
  • Both publicly and privately funded patients engage with a consumerist model of healthcare

New publication!

A new publication is out entitled Patient informed choice in the age of evidence-based medicine: IVF patients’ approaches to biomedical evidence and fertility treatment add-ons. It is open access and available online in the journal Sociology of Health & Illness.

In the article, we challenge the view of IVF patients as willing to uncritically accept or request unproven, expensive treatment as a desperate act to increase their chances of having a baby. Rather, patients are required to make complex treatment choices in a highly commercialised market and an uncertain context of reproductive medicine.

The key findings presented in the article are:

  • Patients are expected to make informed choices about what additional tests and treatments (add-ons) to include in IVF
  • Interviews with patients show how they negotiate the notion of medical evidence in relation to their own experience of going through IVF
  • Approximately half of the patients that we interviewed preferred to delegate the evaluation of evidence to their doctor (or other medical professional)
  • Yet across the whole participant group, we identified four different patient approaches to evidence in IVF
  • The patients interviewed described how they would:
    1. delegate evaluations of evidence to experts;
    2. critically assess available evidence;
    3. acknowledge the process of making evidence;
    4. contextualise evidence in their lived experience of infertility.

Government plans for a Women’s Health Strategy in England

In June 2021 Manuela Perrotta and I responded to the government’s call for evidence to inform their forthcoming Women’s Health Strategy for England. The government consultation received over 110,000 public survey responses and over 400 written responses. Just before the December holidays, the Department of Health & Social Care published their vision for the Strategy based on the responses received. Reflecting the sentiments shared in the public survey, the department’s vision highlights fertility, pregnancy, pregnancy loss and postnatal support as particular areas of concern. This grouping of priority areas was the second most selected option across all survey participants (after menstrual health and gynaecological conditions), and the most selected priority area for those aged 30 to 39. Infertility and fertility treatment are integral parts of this broader concern with reproductive and maternal health.

The vision document highlights the need for ‘more trusted and easier to understand information’ about women’s health issues, including reproductive health, which is a key point that we address in our written evidence. In our submission we emphasised that there is an abundance of information about infertility and fertility treatments, especially online. But prospective and current fertility patients often find the information difficult to navigate and identifying good quality information can be challenging. We found that our study participants generally felt that NHS websites offered good sources of reliable information. In our written evidence, we suggest ways for NHS websites to expand their remit to cater for fertility patients’ needs. We were excited therefore, to learn that one of the next steps for the Strategy will be to progress the quality of online information in collaboration with NHS Digital. We hope that the needs of fertility patients will be addressed in this continued work. We also look forward to following further developments as well as the government’s dedicated Sexual and Reproductive Health Strategy, which is expected later this year. 

PET’s annual conference: The current state and regulation of the fertility sector

At the beginning of December, we kept up our tradition of attending the Progress Educational Trust’s (PET) annual conference. The title and topic of this year’s online event was ‘Reproducing Regulation: Who Regulates Fertility and How?’ With 16 talks across the full day, I have chosen just a handful here that I thought were particularly pertinent to the issues that we consider in our research.

The first speaker of the day was Julia Chain, chair of the Human and Embryology Authority, who had made headlines in the run-up to the conference with her call for changes to the 1990 Human Fertility and Embryology Act. Her proposed changes would enable the HFEA to impose economic sanctions on fertility clinics that mis-sell unproven treatment add-ons. While she emphasised that her call was not a complete rejection of the current regulatory framework, she highlighted the need to update certain areas of the act to reflect the current state of society and the fertility sector. Currently, she noted, the HFEA has no powers to regulate the increasingly commercialised provision of services. Private fertility treatment is increasingly the norm in the UK, with 65% of IVF treatment being self-funded by patients themselves.

Reflecting on the commercialised fertility sector, Raj Mathur from the British Fertility Society brought attention to questions of fairness and equity and the lack of NHS funding for fertility treatment. Many prospective patients, he reminded us, do not have any access to IVF and when they do, affordability is a huge cause of concern. Mathur spoke about the challenges for patients who have to navigate very complex regulations around the provision of funding, before they even reach the point of having to choose between different treatment offerings.

A significant challenge to regulating the fertility sector is the fast pace of innovation. In her talk entitled ‘What is an add-on, and who gets to decide?’ Anja Bisgaard Pinborg, a specialist in reproductive medicine at Copenhagen University, detailed the difficulties of regulating add-ons safely without stifling the progress of medical research. She explained how the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) is working on a new guideline for regulating add-ons. This guideline includes a very extensive range of tests, treatments and techniques, which reflects the vast and complex offerings of the fertility sector. While Bisgaard Pinborg recognised the obligation of clinics to offer the best treatment to their patients and the strong desires that patients may have to try certain (perhaps more experimental) treatments, she also highlighted that patients should never bear the cost of innovation. Patients, she argued, should not pay for add-ons that are still under development. How fertility patients and professionals navigate the complex world of IVF add-ons is something we have covered extensively in our research publications, workshops and in this blog post on how to best support patients’ informed decisions.

Further examples of how the law and regulation lag behind change were raised by Emily Jackson later in the day. Jackson set out how definitions of ‘mother’ in UK fertility law do not easily apply to the new social and family formations that are enabled though reproductive technologies. Currently, the legal definition of mother is defined in terms of who physically gives birth to a child. One of the examples presented by Jackson involved the case of a child that has two female parents at birth. In this case, the person who gives birth is the mother and the partner is the second legal parent. This is also the case when the partner’s egg was used in the IVF treatment. Interestingly in this case, as Jackson pointed out, the second parent is actually the child’s closer genetic relation. Fatherhood on the other hand, is expressed in both genetic and social terms, which allows for greater flexibility and choice in how fatherhood is defined. 

Again, this year’s PET conference succeeded in traversing a wide range of perspectives on the most pressing issues confronting the fertility sector right now.

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