Redirecting NHS referral

[Rankin11]

We went through the referral process with our GP and we were referred to the IVF clinic in a major hospital in London. The waitlist looks to be a year or more.

Since this referral in December, we have discovered a smaller IVF clinic, local to us, are now taking NHS patients.

This local clinic is a 20 minute drive and is next to my workplace, whereas we would have to travel 50 minutes on the tube to where our original clinic was. It's an hour and a half from my work (outside London).

Big London clinic has very good success rates, but the local place has a much shorter waitlist.

As we haven't been seen for an initial consult yet, we were hoping we might be able to select a different clinic.

Has anyone been able to change their clinic choice at this stage of referral?

Thank you!

You should be able to change at any point if you have not yet started treatment.

Bear in mind the size, experience and expertise of the lab as this can influence results.

Good luck!

Thank you!

Yes I'm conscious that the small clinic has a significantly lower success rate, though still in line with national average. Not sure how much that has to do with the size!

Hard to work these things out!

NB: The HFEA uses the ‘in line with the national average’ label about every single clinic in the country with maybe just a couple of exceptions – this label spans 7% live birth rate to 38% LBR (that’s in my age group).

I realised after looking at every clinic in the country (I compiled an excel sheet with all of them as you can only search by post code on the website and I wanted to find the best success rates nationally).

Is age a factor?

Oh wow, that's really interesting. I had noticed a major hospital near me was marked as 'Under national average' with a birth rate of about 20% per transfer, whilst the small clinic I'm considering is 25%.

Most NHS hospitals in London are around 30% per transfer, so it wasn't a huge red flag to me. I am seeing some clinics with more like 40-50% the more I look though.

Do you mean my age or the age of users of the clinic?

You can filter results by age of patient so I assume you are under 38? There will be a different range of figures for this age group, but ‘in keeping with the national average’ as defined by the HFEA is extremely broad – after a point I just ignored this and compared solely by figures.

(The range of figures above are for the over 38 filter and from memory were for LBR per egg collection).

Sorry and by age being a factor I meant in terms of urgency of the referral – if you are under 38 (and particularly if you are significantly under this), I personally would wait for the referral to the clinic with the better figures. But would ask for confirmation of waiting times first in writing.

If you are entitled to more than one round before 40, I would also take this into account – how comfortably could you fit this in with the waiting times. Also bear in mind that once the ball is rolling with treatment, you should not have the initial wait again (from what I understand – please check this is case it varies by hospital / ICB).