PET Trustee Professor Richard Anderson and PET director Sarah Norcross were panellists at the Future of Fertility forum. The event marked the launch of the report 'Understanding the Decline in Live Birth Rate in the UK: Barriers, Beliefs and Opportunities to Support Future Families'.
Doina Ionescu, general manager at Merck Healthcare UK, opened the event. She did so not with the usual corporate rhetoric but with an engaging personal account of her career, life choices, difficulties having a family and work / life balance. She urged the young women in the audience to learn from her mistakes.
This was followed by a discussion facilitated by Syeda Hasnain, head of communications for UK&IE Healthcare at Merck, and Dr Marianne Vendola, a consultant at London Women’s Clinic, joined Richard and Sarah on the panel for this.
The discussion started with the implications of the low birth rate in the UK for future generations. One example discussed was the impact on the health service. The NHS is dependant on younger and healthier individuals taxes to fund a service which is used by people throughout their lifetimes, but mostly in old age. Failing to maintain the level of payments into the system could result in some generations having to pay higher taxes for programmes that they may not be able to access in the future.
The panel also discussed the importance of fertility education throughout the life course, and not just in schools, the inequity in access to treatment for certain sections of society particularly black people and those not in a heterosexual relationship. Sarah discussed the PET NHS Fertility Policy Funding Tracker and the inequity in access to NHS-funded treatment in England.
The Future of Fertility forum panellists covered some of the key recommendations in the Report. You find those and read the whole Report on the PET website.
The conversation turned to how employers may help tackle the funding gap through employee benefts such as interest-free loans to help fund fertility treatment.
This segued seamlessly into the next session in which Becky Kearns from Fertility Matters at Work talked about the importance of fertility policies in the workplace. She explained how supporting staff when going through fertility treatment was the right thing to do not just for the member of staff concerned, but also for the business.
Thank you to Merck for organising such a powerful event. We hope that the audience at the event and others will join us in campaigning to make change happen for the people who are struggling to have a much-wanted family.