Chief Executive's letter

15 June 2016

Ref: CE(16) 02

To all Persons Responsible

Dear colleague

Notification of changes to Choose a Fertility Clinic and Clinic Portal

I am writing to let you know about our plans for the new Choose a Fertility Clinic tool and Clinic Portal. You will already be familiar with these, based on the Information for Quality consultation survey and workshops in late 2014, the various articles in Clinic Focus since then and our presentations at the annual conference (available on the conference website). This letter provides formal notification of the forthcoming changes.

Our ambition for the Information for Quality programme, as expressed in our strategy, has been to transform the way that we collect, analyse and publish information for the benefit of clinics and patients alike. A significant part of that is the new Choose a Fertility Clinic tool, which will present a more rounded picture of clinic performance where statistics are complimented by ratings from patients and an inspection rating. Taking advice from experts in the sector and consulting widely, we have decided to prioritise pregnancy and birth data that best indicate the quality of the clinic’s service.

The new Clinic Portal will reduce the time it takes to submit data, make licence applications and find regulatory information. As we’ve said before, the new data submission element of the Clinic Portal will be launched later this year and you should use current submission methods until that time. However, the rest of the portal will become live at the same time as the website.

The new website and Clinic Portal will be rolled out gradually over the next few months. Best practice and government rules demand that new IT products are developed in stages, and released in ‘beta’ form first, before they are officially launched (see below for timelines). During the beta phase, the existing website and Clinic Portal remain the official services which you should use and to which you should refer your patients and donors. The aim of making the new services available in beta form is to get feedback from patients, clinic staff and other future users. We will use that feedback to improve the services before they go ‘live’ in the autumn.

Pregnancy, birth and multiple birth data

As noted above, we are changing both what data we present on Choose a Fertility Clinic and how we present it. The screenshots at Annex A give an illustration of how it will look. The new headline rate for IVF (including ISCI) is births per embryo transferred, with each clinic’s overall rate presented alongside the national rate. This will be followed by a new cumulative rate, based on births per egg collection, and the multiple birth rate. Taken together we believe that this will provide a rounded statistical picture of the clinical outcomes of each clinic.

Our Director of Compliance and Information, Nick Jones, has written individually to all treatment clinics today, to give them early sight of their outcome data, as it will be published on Choose a Fertility Clinic. At the end of June we will send those clinics a private web address to access the website and portal, so that they can see how their clinic information will appear on the live beta site, alongside that of other clinics. We will not make the website and portal public until mid July.

The data section of each clinic’s profile page will display the following, according to which treatments the clinic provides. A detailed methodology is at Annex B.

It is important to note that these headline rates are not the only data on our website on each clinic. There will also be a detailed statistics page for IVF, DI and for IUI, which contain the same information as appears on the current Choose a Fertility Clinic. This includes the six age bands which we currently use.

Patient rating

We will introduce a patient rating feature, allowing patients and donors who have received care at the clinic within the last 12 months to rate their clinic in a number of areas. As we described at the conference, the feature will be open to all and no registration is required. This is based on feedback from patients that registering to prove their identity would deter them from giving a rating.

If patients want to give additional feedback, they will be able to complete extra fields which are not published on the site, but sent directly to the clinic’s inspector. These comments – and the ratings themselves – will be used by the inspector to assess patient feedback. This will replace the paper and online patient feedback form that we currently use.

We received some feedback at the conference about how we could help guard against abuse of the system. We will monitor the IP addresses of those giving feedback to make sure no-one is making multiple submissions. I should also remind you that it is unlawful for anyone working in a clinic to impersonate a patient, either to rate their own clinic or another. We will monitor the service and consider any feedback we receive during the beta phase to see if we need to make any changes.

Please encourage your patients to give feedback about your clinic; the more that respond, the more meaningful the ratings will be and the more you will be able to show that you have a patient-centred service. Each clinic’s page of Choose a Fertility Clinic has a unique web address, so you can share a direct link with your patients.

Inspection rating

Patients are keen to know not just the clinic’s outcome rates and patient ratings, but also how we rate them as the regulator. We have developed a rating proposal based on the length of the clinic’s licence, mapped to a five-star rating:

(*based on a data extraction in May 2016)

If your clinic has a licence shorter than 4 years (including special directions) through no fault of your own (perhaps because of an administrative error on our part or because the clinic is new and has no compliance history to draw on), no rating will be shown (marked as Null on the table). Appropriate caveats and explanations will be added.

The inspection rating data will be uploaded to Choose a Fertility Clinic during the beta phase.

Clinic Portal

The new Clinic Portal will go into the ‘beta’ phase at the end of June. At that point, you will be issued with a password, so that you can access the parts of the portal which show clinic-specific information and provide appropriate access to other staff within your clinic.

You will see that there is a section, called My Clinic, which allows you to monitor and upload information which appears on Choose a Fertility Clinic. This includes:

• Clinic opening hours
• A photograph/logo – guidance will be available on the portal, but is also at Annex C
• Waiting times and source for eggs, sperm and embryos
• Service features, for example whether you have female doctors available

We are not asking clinics to supply a description of the clinic, as we have before. Instead, we will use the description of your clinic which appeared in your most recent inspection report. This describes the services you offer, whether you treat NHS or self-funded patients and what size your clinic is. We will no longer be asking you to maintain a list of all members of staff in your clinic but will instead ask you to give details of your staff complement for specified role types only.

Timescales

To summarise the timescale for launching the new Choose a Fertility Clinic and Clinic Portal:

15 June - This letter sent to all Persons Responsible
15 June - Individual outcome data sent to treatment clinics
Late-June - Treatment clinics given access to the new website
Late-June - Treatment clinics given access to the new Clinic Portal
Mid July - Link added to the current website and Clinic Portal advertising the ‘beta’ websites

What you should do now

From now:

• Read and absorb this letter, letting relevant staff in your clinic know the contents
• Read the letter from Nick Jones, Director of Compliance and Information, and check that you understand the data that will be published about your clinic. Use the contact details in the letter if you have any queries.

In late June:

• Check the Clinic Portal to make sure the information about your clinic is up to date and make changes or add information where necessary
• Check the information about your clinic on Choose a Fertility Clinic
• Start to let you patients know about the patient rating feature as they will be able to use it from mid July
• Look around the portal and the website and give feedback on content and usability. Remember that this is a beta site which is being developed over time and is not the official HFEA site. So expect to see gaps or changes until it is officially live.

These new services have been developed over many months with expert advice from many of you in the sector, for which I am very grateful. I very much hope that you think that the end result has been worth it. We believe that the new Choose a Fertility Clinic and Clinic Portal represent a step change in the way that we communicate with patients and the way that you communicate with us, leaving you to devote more time to your patients.

If you have any feedback about the new services, either now or when you have seen the beta website in a few weeks’ time, please email InformationforQuality@hfea.gov.uk.

Yours faithfully

Peter Thompson
Chief Executive

Full letter and annex 1 and 2 (PDF 620 KB)

Page last updated: 05 October 2016