04 April 2016
4 April 2016
To all Persons Responsible
Dear colleague
Legal parenthood: what you must do
At our recent annual conference, I made some comments about the problems with legal parenthood consent which many of you have experienced in your clinic. This letter is to reiterate to all PRs what I said at the conference. Please share the contents of this letter with your staff.
I wrote to you all in February and September 2014 about this issue. In the first I asked you to complete an audit and in the second I shared the findings of those audits with you. We also published a comprehensive list of legal parenthood questions and answers, a case study from Barts and The London Centre for Reproductive Medicine and ran a series of workshops about consent. In 2015, after a further, previously missed, case came to light, I asked you to carry out a further audit and to report the findings to your inspector.
This audit revealed that there are numerous cases where consent to parenthood was not taken properly, some of which need to be resolved in the family court. The anomalies have happened across many clinics and across the years since 2009. It seems that repeated human error, rather than anything systemic is the cause. I know that those of you who identified anomalies have reviewed your practices and retrained staff – and that you have been working with your inspector to learn from each mistake. However, all of you should take the following key measures to ensure that such mistakes do not happen again:
- Make sure that your staff understand legal parenthood consent and how to take and record it correctly.
- Make sure that your patients and their partners understand the importance of consent to legal parenthood and what might happen if it is not in place.
- Use the HFEA consent forms, WP and PP, not your own forms
- Offer counselling, give information and record this in the patient notes
- Keep a copy of the consent form and give a copy to the patient and their partner.
Leaflet for patients and partners.
We have published a leaflet for patients and their partners to help them understand when they need to give consent to parenthood. Please make sure that you tell patients about this leaflet, which can be downloaded from our website. It is your responsibility to ensure patients understand legal parenthood and consent has been properly taken and recorded using HFEA consent forms.
The anomalies included failure to use HFEA consent to parenthood forms. We know some of you use your own consent forms to collect consent to parenthood. This can lead to confusion and errors being made. Use only the HFEA legal parenthood consent forms (WP and PP forms) to collect this important consent.
Managing cases with anomalies.
As you know, a mistake in consent to legal parenthood can have a devastating impact on families. Some patients have needed to seek a declaration of parenthood in the family court – and more are due to in the future. This is clearly a very distressing and difficult situation for all involved. If a declaration of parenthood isn’t granted, adoption might be the only option to ensure legal parenthood.
Most of you have handled such cases with care and attention, responding promptly to our requests for information and supporting patients emotionally and financially through the legal process. You have been candid with patients, letting them know when you have discovered an anomaly. As I said at the conference, this what we expect all clinics to do.
Those clinics who have handled cases well will not face any regulatory action from us. However, we may need to take action against those of you who have not done so - you will know from communication with your inspector if that is the case. We all make mistakes. It’s how we deal with the consequences of those mistakes – and how we learn from them - that really counts.
Yours faithfully
Peter Thompson
Chief Executive
Download this letter (PDF 83.2KB)
Download the new legal parenthood leaflet (PDF 1.34MB)Page last updated: 12 August 2016