Chief Executive's letter

04 April 2017

To all Persons Responsible

Dear colleague

Launch of our new website

I last wrote to you on 31 March to tell you that, following the resolution of the judicial review, our new website and new Choose a Fertility Clinic (CaFC) service will go live in the coming weeks.

This letter summarises the changes we will make to CaFC before it goes live, based on policy decisions on data presentation that the Authority took in November last year.

Results of the beta survey

You will remember that to gather feedback on the beta CaFC service, we ran an eight-week public consultation in the summer last year, asking for views about how IVF birth statistics are presented on CaFC and whether we had made the right decisions about how the data should be aggregated or stratified. The consultation had the following elements:

• an online survey
• a workshop for clinic staff
• one-to-one user testing
• advice from the IfQ Advisory Group

Taking this very helpful feedback into account, our board decided to change the way that some IVF birth statistics are presented on CaFC. We have been waiting for the outcome of the judicial review before making those changes to the beta website, so the site does not yet reflect the board’s decisions. However, we will now update the site before going live.

You can read the board paper and listen to an audio recording of the discussion on our website. The main changes are summarised below.

Pregnancy, birth and multiple birth data

The key elements of IVF data presentation on CaFC – such as using births per embryo transferred as the new headline rate for IVF – are unchanged. The presentation of births per egg collection and multiple births are also unchanged. However, we have decided to aggregate the data differently. We will make the following changes before going live.

1. In the search results and at the top of the clinic profile page, we will continue to show the IVF birth rate per embryo transferred, but the presentation will change to an indication of whether the clinic’s rate is below, consistent with or above the national average, rather than showing the actual rate. In response to your feedback, the calculation will now consist of fresh, stimulated IVF and ICSI for women under 38 years (see mock-up below), rather than all types of IVF and all ages.
2. Further down the profile page, we will show the birth rate for IVF in more detail, as well as the pregnancy or birth rates for partner IUI and donor insemination. The data presentation of partner IUI and DI data will remain the same. The presentation of IVF data will remain broadly the same, except that it will now consist of fresh, stimulated IVF and ICSI for women under 38 years, rather than all types of IVF and all ages. We will retain the age stratification of under 38, 38 and over and all ages, but reorder it and default it to under 38s.
3. We will refresh all the data on CaFC following our current data verification exercise, so that the data at ‘go live’ is the most recent.
4. The data on the ‘Detailed statistics’ section of CaFC will remain the same, with breakdowns by treatment type, six age bands, embryo source and year.
5. We will publish a detailed methodology of all the data in CaFC in May.

Patient rating

We have developed 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. 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 used in the past.

The Authority board recently approved a trial of the feature, which will run for 12 months. We will evaluate the feature, for usefulness to patients, clinics and HFEA inspectors. We will also monitor for any signs of misuse.

When the website goes live, we will send you marketing materials for the patient ratings feature, so you can encourage as many responses as possible. We will also market the feature directly to patients.

Inspection rating

We have developed a rating proposal based on the length of the clinic’s licence, mapped to a five-star rating:

We will use the following exceptions:

• If your clinic has a licence shorter than 4 years (including a temporary licence under special directions) through no fault of your own, perhaps because of an administrative error on our part, we will show the rating from your previous licence.
• If your clinic is on a standard two-year licence because it is new, we will grey out the rating and mark it as a new clinic.
• If your clinic has been given a licence shorter than 4 years (including a temporary licence under special directions) because of concerns about compliance and you have formally challenged that decision, the rating from your previous licence will apply until the matter is resolved.

We will not change the inspection rating during your licence, even where an interim inspection has shown that performance has declined or improved.

Your clinic’s profile on Choose a Fertility Clinic If you haven’t done so already, please update your clinic’s details on CaFC. These are:

• the opening hours
• a photograph or logo
• service features (such as whether you have female doctors available)
• the waiting times and source for donated eggs, sperm and embryos.

You can update this information via the ‘My Clinic’ section of the Clinic Portal. Guidelines on photographs are at Annex A.

Our new website has been a long time in development and I want to thank you for your patience and your feedback, but it will be worth the wait. It will be the first port of call for accurate, unbiased information about clinics and treatment options, and will, I am sure, make the difficult choices that patients face a little easier. Together, we can make a real difference to the quality of care that patients receive.

Yours faithfully

Peter Thompson
Chief Executive

• Annex I