Trust in IVF is broken – it must be restored
IVF providers are often the last resort for aspiring parents when nature seems to have conspired against them. They are the facilitators of that hope. Patients put their trust in them. It should never be broken. And yet, as recent news reports and developments have shown, it is. This is unconscionable. This is human life after all. An error in the delivery of this precious gift is devastatingly traumatic to those involved.
The Age has recently reported on two incidents involving Monash IVF. In one, a woman received the wrong embryo at its Clayton clinic in June, and in 2023 at its Brisbane facility, an embryo transfer error led to a Queensland woman giving birth to a stranger's baby.
A few years earlier, Monash paid $56 million in compensation to settle a class action involving 700 families affected in a bungled genetic testing program. The error might have caused healthy embryos to be tossed out. Monash chief executive Michael Knaap resigned this month.
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Australia's health ministers agreed last week to a three-month review to look into the best model for an independent accreditation body to oversee the assisted reproductive technology sector. The states' health secretaries will also examine a possible realignment of the state-based regulators, their axing for a national regulator, and if registration requirements should be extended to embryologists and scientists involved in fertility processes. The Age welcomes these developments. At present, the industry operates under a self-accreditation and licensing system under the Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee. Queensland is the only state not to endorse a national body, having only recently adopted a regulation scheme.
Victorian Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas said last week that the present system was not working. 'It simply doesn't pass the pub test that the people that provide the service are also the ones that determine who provides the service,' she said.
It is equally troubling that, as Thomas conceded, the errors that are made public may represent only a percentage of the true figure of fertility patient complications across the industry. 'I think it's concerning that, in fact, there may well be more errors that we don't know about, and that is because the body that currently accredits fertility care providers is made up of fertility care providers,' she said.
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