Costs of ivf cycle at create or CRGH

[Chillichutney1]

Both base cycle costs are £3400, does anyone have any experience with these clinics of what additional costs might be? Looks like Create includes blastocyst culture but CRGH doesn’t and also I’d guess the cost of medication would be much lower with Create.

Any experience with cost of ivf cycles at these clinics? Thanks!

I did 5 rounds of IVF with Create

The first and second cycles were short protocol mild IVF on top of the standard treatment fee of £3,450 it cost the following per cycle

+£1k ICSI
+£1k for medication - approx

• £1k support package - recommend this so you don't have to worry If you stim for longer and need extra blood tests +£1k due to having to have a freeze all due to OHSS +£1k approx for a frozen transfer

On the second cycle I also did PGS testing which bumped the price up by about another £1.5k

So those 2 cycles alone with 3 transfers cost is about £20k!

After these 2 egg collections/embryo transfers failed we then signed up to do a 3 cycle package of Natural Modified IVF which was £13.5k all in including ICSI, support package, drugs, freezing and transfer so much cheaper than doing individual cycles. (I wish we'd just done natural modified first!)

£7.5k 3 cycle package with embryoscope as this includes freezing and storage for 12 months and a transfer
+£3k for 3 lots of ICSI
+£2.3k for support package for all 3 cycles
+£750 for medication for all 3 cycles

We investigated CRGH and nearly went with them but ended up going abroad for 1st cycle. There seemed to be a few hidden costs for things that aren’t listed and are in theory optional but were recommended to the point of being required! E.g. £500 estimated for blood tests during stimulation, £600 for blastocyst culture, £s for dummy embryo transfer and additional for a few other bits and pieces. That said, they seemed very competent and we likely would have gone ahead if some family assistance with funding hadn’t gone awry.

One thing that seems to be the case with most U.K. clinics is that if you need to do a freeze all (e.g. due to risk of OHSS) the stimulation and freezing cost is pretty much the same as if you were to have a fresh transfer. We were told from the beginning that we were very likely to be unable to do a fresh transfer (high antral follicle count) so had to take the price of the frozen transfer into account. It varies quite a bit between clinics. One of the reasons our clinic abroad appealed is that if you’re doing a freeze-all cycle they knock the cost of the transfer off the original cycle package.

Ops, and also, we were told we would need ICSI (I think more than half of cycles are now done using this) which was additional at CRGH - I think around £1.2K - though this is not unique to them, it’s priced as an add-on across the board in the UK (though included in cycle cost abroad).

I'm with crgh and it's definitely expensive. Just paid my lump sum to Access Fertility and will get billed for anything over and above through crgh. Over and above will be all the blood tests, medication and I'm sure they'll be other stuff too!

Thank you for the helpful info, I think I’ve decided against CRGH as it looks like they add on lots of extras like blood tests through stims etc

The support package at create looks really expensive for what it is though - isn’t the hfea fee and sedation around £80 and £300ish - thats £600 ish on blood tests!

@Chillichutney1

Thank you for the helpful info, I think I’ve decided against CRGH as it looks like they add on lots of extras like blood tests through stims etc

The support package at create looks really expensive for what it is though - isn’t the hfea fee and sedation around £80 and £300ish - thats £600 ish on blood tests!

The support package covers all the blood tests and the sedation fee. (Really don't know why that isn't included as standard- not like you'd decide to do it without it!)

If you paid individually

HFEA is £80
Sedation is £250
Blood tests - say at least £150 at each scan depending on how many they think you need. So say 4 scans
So that totals £930

The support package is £940 and basically it just means you get unlimited blood tests etc - some cycles I've had 4 scans and blood tests and others I've had 6 but as I did the support package I didn't have to pay out anymore.
Which I would have done if was paying individually.

I don't think it "saves" you any money necessarily on a basic cycle but it does give you a fixed fee and saves money if you end up having lots of blood tests say If you need to stim for longer

I feel like there really needs to be a legal requirement for cost transparency among fertility clinics. Pretty much every clinic advertises their cycle cost as around £3.5K, but pretty much every cycle ends up costing double that or more. It’s not as if you can do a stimulation cycle without the scans, bloods and medication, and egg collection without sedation would be a bit barbaric! So advertising costs without these is things is not helpful. I know that clinics justify not being upfront by saying that everyone needs different numbers of scans, blood tests, different medication etc but maybe they should be required to post a cost for a long and a short protocol package which includes the average number of scans, blood tests and average meds cost for each?

@Createyourusername

I agree - I found Create very transparent with costs but I think I was still very naive about how much the final bill would be. Create always did us a cost sheet before signing up to any cycle to give us an indication of cost but our first cycle ended up costing a lot more because I had OHSS so then had to pay for freezing and then an FET which hadn't even crossed my mind and wasn't explained very well? I was a lot more knowledgeable by the time of signing up to the 3 cycle package and that didn't cost us a penny more than they said it would.

They should really give you "worst case" rather than "best case" but then maybe more people would be put off by the cost and wouldn't sign up?

Also the finance agreements arent great - they only do up to 2 years which is still £500 a month whereas a bank loan over 5 years halved that cost and is much more affordable