A Primary Care Trust is an English National Health Service (NHS) organisation that provides some primary care (e.g. doctor's surgery/office) and some community (e.g. community nursing) services.
Louise Brown, the world's first IVF baby, will be 30 years old on 25 July 2008. Here Clare Brown, who was among those to speak at a reception organised by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Infertility to mark next week's National Infertility Day 2008, reflects on three decades of...
Only nine out of 151 primary care trusts (PCTs) in England are funding the recommended three cycles of IVF for infertile couples, according to the UK Department of Health. The latest figures reveal that despite guidance issued over four years ago, four trusts are still offering...
A British MP has raised more concerns about access to National Heath Service-funded IVF in the UK. It transpires that a number of IVF clinics in the UK are denying free treatment to women who smoke. Labour MP Sally Keeble identified the latest barrier to accessing...
Not just one or two, not just a hundred or so, not just several hundred, but probably thousands of couples who need assisted conception treatment such as IVF or ICSI in order to have a child are not able to access that treatment on the NHS...
Last week, nurses in the UK decided to take action and lobby the British government to demand uniform eligibility criteria for infertility treatment and for the provision of up to three cycles of NHS-funded IVF be implemented by all UK fertility clinics, replacing the arbitrary 'postcode lottery...
In issue 451 of BioNews we published a news story that implied that guidelines produced by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in 2004 for the provision of IVF on the NHS, which recommended that all Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) should provide three cycles of IVF treatment...
Happy New Year. I would like to introduce myself as the new director of Progress Educational Trust (PET), the UK charity that publishes BioNews. Throughout its 15 year history, PET has been dedicated to facilitating informed discussion in the areas of assisted reproduction, embryo research and human genetics, via public...
The UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) called last week for a new national strategy designed to reduce the number of multiple births from fertility treatments, as a result of which it expects to see the multiple birth rate to fall to 10 per cent...
The Human Genetics Commission (HGC) is an independent body, which was established in 1999. Its role is to consider the ethical, social and legal implications of advances in human genetics, to listen to the public and to advise ministers on what, if anything, the government needs to do. The appointed...
The continuing lack of public funding to help many UK couples affected by infertility was highlighted recently by a new survey, carried out by Infertility Network UK (I N UK) (See BioNews 420). Both as patient organisations CHILD and ISSUE, prior to our merger in 2003 to form I N...
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