F/F relationship and IVF - clinic/parental leave advice

[asnugglysnerd]

Hello,

My partner and I are about to begin starting a family. Trying to choose a clinic - does anyone have any experiences, good or bad, of any clinics in or around London or South West UK?

Also, has anyone done shared parental leave instead of the entire maternity leave?

Thanks!

We went with Herts fertility and got pregnant on our first cycle.

I'm taking full MAT leave I won't be sharing it lol

We used Create. I have a few grumbles about it but overall I liked the low drug approach.

We shared leave. I took just under 6 months. My husband overlapped with me for the last few weeks of that (we moved house and it was Christmas) and then he took another couple of months. That worked quite well as he was in charge of the messiest bit of weaning!

I’m not familiar with any clinics in the area sorry but we did share leave and found it worked really well for us. My wife had 4 months, I overlapped a month with her and then had three months plus some annual leave so we overlapped again, then she had the remainder. It worked really well for us that there was like a hand over period :) we made good use of it with holidays as well!

Thank you for your responses:) we quite like Herts and Essex, Bristol Centre for Reproductive Medicine and Bath...

How does the shared parental leave work??

We used Create for x3 rounds of IVF but wouldn't recommend them based on our experience. We then moved to London Women's Clinic (the Bristol branch) and they were amazing.
We are doing shared parental leave. I'm doing the first 6 months and my wife is doing the second 6 months. We overlap by 3 weeks and will go on holiday then.

Sorry to resurrect this thread - I was searching for Create Bristol as have appointment with them tomorrow - like the idea of low / no drugs approach
Can you kindly elaborate why you didn't like them ? I used Oxford Fertility Center before bit we moved last year
Many thanks

The appointments always felt rushed. We had very little time with the consultant. Everything was done by the nurse who, whilst very nice, often couldn't make decisions. She'd need to call the consultant after our appointment and then call us later in the day with his guidance/recommendation. This meant we had limited opportunity to ask questions directly.
A huge mistake was made by the birmingham clinic where we had the embryo transfer. The wrong catheter was used, there was a panic and I'm not convinced that the embryo was ever transferred in. It was very traumatic.