Private IVF prior to NHS funded IVF - Is it possible / allowed?

[Jesje]

Does anybody know how your NHS fertility clinic is going to find out whether you have done any privately funded IVF cycles already?

I'm entitled to three IVF cycles on the NHS. However, waiting lists are so long and as I'm not getting any younger with borderline low AMH and FSH + endo, we decided to do a privately funded cycle first. That has now been completed and unfortunately it ended with a chemical pregnancy. We have one more frozen embryo waiting with the private clinic. At the same time, we have just received an appointment by the NHS fertility clinic for intake and some further testing (9 months after seeing our GP first time on this - long story which I'm sure many of us will have similar stories on...). I can imagine that after this intake appointment we will again face a 6+ month waiting list for the actual IVF.

The NHS fertility clinic sent us an information pack which says that privately funded IVF cycles are taken off your NHS IVF cycle entitlements. I would have rather shared my privately funded IVF protocol with the NHS fertility clinic so that they can build on that but now I'm debating whether we should just keep this information to ourselves. I'm unsure though if they will find anyway?? Can they obtain information on previous (privately funded) cycles through the HFEA?

Hope somebody can shed some light on this!

I was advised against going privately before the NHS. I am not sure what are the recommendations in your hospital. Anyway, once you are invited to see a consultant, it goes quickly.

Lying is rather dishonest and isn't fair on those that can't afford to go private and have stuck out the waiting time

Also if you lie and say you haven't had any private cycles anything that the clinic could have learned from your first cycle won't be taken into account and so you'd be starting from scratch again and possibly waste another cycle

Depends on your area/clinic. I checked this out with my GP for my area before I got anything done privately. My CCG rules are that you can have one private funded IVF cycle (but no more) then go back for NHS treatment, but they also all share data, so my NHS tests are shared with private clinic and GP and vice versa...