A New Zealand fertility clinic has been criticised by the Health and Disability Commissioner, after losing cancer patient's frozen sperm.
The anonymous man froze his sperm before having chemotherapy treatment in 1995. The clinic was later purchased by Fertility Associates, where he and his partner sought fertility treatment in 2018. The sperm samples were found to be missing and were not recovered in a search of all storage tanks. A testicular biopsy on the man found no sperm which could be used in treatment.
Deputy health and disability commissioner Dr Vanessa Caldwell said: 'I acknowledge that loss of samples is a rare and devastating risk to assisted reproductive technologies, however, I am critical that Fertility Associates lost the man's sperm samples, and that its systems were unable to provide evidence of how or when the loss occurred.'
An internal investigation by Fertility Associates found the samples were in their possession in 2011 and concluded the most likely reason for the loss was the failure of staff to follow policies when the storage tank in which the samples were stored was decommissioned.
According to Dr Caldwell, poor record-keeping prevented her investigation from reaching a definitive conclusion on how the samples were lost. Fertility Associates were unable to identify which staff were involved, what steps were in place to ensure that they had the necessary skills and training, and how policies around the storage of samples were monitored.
Fertility Associates responded to the commissioner, mentioning that no system could eliminate human error and that it is 'provable from data and well-established that a certain error rate is inevitable.'
'The loss of the storage samples for this man has meant that while he had hoped to have a genetically related child, this is now not possible,' Dr Michael Chapman, the clinical director of the IVF Australia clinic in Sydney, who is not involved with the clinic where the error took place told 1 News.
Fertility Associates has reached a financial settlement with the couple. The company has also updated their procedures to minimise the risk of a recurrence, including splitting samples between multiple locations, improving record keeping and raising an incident report in the event any samples are not in their recorded location.
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