Starting your IVF journey is a big decision, and there’s a lot to consider even before you begin treatment. One of those is choosing a fertility clinic that’s right for you, and to help you make your choice, you’ll likely want to know more about clinic’s IVF success rates.
A fertility clinic’s IVF success rates tell you the percentage of treatments that had a successful outcome. While they can give you an idea a fertility clinics’ performance, due to the many unique factors impacting patients on their fertility journey, they can’t predict whether your own treatment will be successful.
Success rates are a record of whether the clinic’s IVF birth rate is in-line with the national average using measures such as: births per embryo transferred, births per cycle, births per egg collection and multiple births. This information can be found alongside inspector and patient feedback.
Other factors that inform IVF success rates include number of cycles started, number of cycles reaching egg collection stage, number of cycles reaching embryo transfer stage, and number of cycles cancelled.
It’s not always easy to compare clinic IVF success rates, like for like, as different factors can impact figures between clinics, such as:
- Patients’ fertility history
- Number of patients treated
- Size of the clinic
- Laboratory processes
- Patients’ age and overall health
Some clinics may also specialise in catering to a specific group of patients (older women, for example) or in providing a certain type of treatment, which can also affect their success rates.
Still, IVF success rates, when compared with the HFEA national average, will give you a broad overview of how successful IVF treatment is at any fertility clinic, and can help you make an informed decision about where to undergo treatment.
IVF Success Rates FAQs
The Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA), the government’s independent regulator for fertility treatment and research, reports the IVF success rates of all registered UK fertility clinics on its website. The only figures the HFEA doesn’t publish are those for clinics performing very small numbers of cycles or individual satellite clinics.
Both pregnancy and live birth rate can be useful pieces of information to know before deciding on a clinic. The pregnancy rate is a measure of IVF cycles that resulted in pregnancies, including those that miscarried. While the live birth rate only includes IVF cycles where a pregnancy ended in a live birth.
The births per embryo transferred as includes individual embryo transfers to promote practices that minimise the chance of twins. However, this measure does not incorporate the outcomes of patients who do not reach embryo transfer stage.
While the births per egg collection rate shows the chance of success from all fresh and frozen embryo transfers within two years of one egg collection.
This rate shows the number of multiple births (twins, triplets, quadruplets etc) divided by the total number of births.