27 September 2024
To PRs of HFEA licensed centres
Dear Colleague
I am writing to let you know about some changes that will take place to the information the HFEA makes available publicly in relation to licensing, regulatory activity and incident information. This is in advance of the annual ‘State of the Fertility Sector’ report due to be published next week.
As you will know, the HFEA website holds information on individual pages for each licensed clinic. On these Choose a Fertility Clinic (CaFC) pages we publish minutes of relevant licensing committee meetings, including inspection reports, as well as other information such as patients’ ratings and success rates. Most of the information on the clinic CaFC pages is generated by the HFEA, but some of this information can be updated by the clinic such as donor waiting times or parking information.
Over the past few years, the Authority has been discussing how our regulatory decisions could be made more accessible to the public, and in particular patients, as committee minutes and inspection reports are written to meet formal governance and regulatory requirements and not specifically for a patient audience. The Authority discussed this in May 2021 and November 2021.
We have continued to look at how regulatory information and decisions can be made more easily available to patients and the wider public and the Authority agreed a number of actions at the meeting on 25 September 2024. Papers from the meeting are available on the HFEA website.
From now on the following will happen:
- When the HFEA Licence Committee suspends or revokes a clinic licence, or adds additional conditions, a summary of the decision will be made public through a news release; social media posts; and information on the clinic’s CaFC pages. This includes removing the rating for the duration of the suspension to avoid causing confusion for patients. The PR and Licence Holder would always be notified about the decision beforehand.
- Information about licensing decisions will be made more easily available to the public. You can see a rough mock up of how this might look on page 50 of the Authority papers here.
- Details of incidents by type (e.g. administrative, clinical, laboratory) and grade by clinic will be published as part of the underlying data set with the annual State of the Fertility Sector report. We publish underlying data sets as part of our reports and these remain on the HFEA website with the relevant publications.
I hope you will agree that these steps will increase transparency of the information we publish for patients and the wider public.
Kind regards
Peter Thompson
Chief Executive