BICA (the British Infertility Counselling Association) held its Annual Conference 2024 in London.
PET director Sarah Norcross was delighted to join fertility counsellors and to chair the morning session of their conference.
Sarah is a morning person but even she was blown away by the first speaker Helga Sól Ólafsdóttir Associate Professor at the University of Iceland who had the audience dancing! You had to be there!
This excitement was followed by more serious updates from Clare Ettinghausen from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and Kate Brian from the Fertility Alliance.
After this Gerry McCluskey a BICA fertility counsellor updated the audience on research into trauma in infertility.
There followed a very interesting talk on social egg freezing from Victoria Powell who is a senior fertility nurse at Agora Fertility Clinic.
Next Mel Johnson (founder of the Stork and I) told us of her journey to solo parenthood and how this led to her becoming a solo parenthood coach. This was a very moving talk of her own very personal journey.
The conference organisers had not forgotten male fertility issues, and the final speaker of the morning session was Stuart Dawe-Long, a senior clinical scientist in andrology. Stuart spoke from the heart about how he had worked to improve conversations with men when they present in andrology. He described how those conversations could sometimes be challenging but more often were very rewarding.
It was a great morning with an excellent line up of speakers. Sarah just about managed to keep control of the audience who were very excited to see each other.
