Success rates
Results for individual CARE clinics
Choosing the right clinic is an important decision for you to make, and one of your key considerations is likely to be the clinic's success rates.
It is important though to remember that the success rates have their limitations when used to compare your own experiences or personal choices. Various things can affect success rates, such as:
- the type of patients treated at the clinic (their age, the cause of their infertility, how long they've been infertile)
- the treatment that the clinic can provide
- the clinic's treatment practices
Whilst some clinics may turn away patients with serious fertility problems because these patients may lower their success rates, the CARE team want to help everyone. Despite this, we still achieve consistently high results for our patients.
Please note that information on success rates is of limited value in comparing fertility centres and choosing where to seek treatment. Please click here to see the HFEA’s advice on choosing a clinic.
Understanding success rates
It’s not always easy to understand what a clinic’s results mean and the best way to really understand your chances of successful treatment with CARE is to talk to one of our consultants. But if you’d like to look through our IVF success rates and other results in advance, we can help you to get to grips with what they mean for you. Read the outline below and if you have any questions please just call the team at your local CARE clinic and they’ll be happy to help you
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has guidelines for how results should be reported. The HFEA also reports on whether clinics’ results are lower, consistent with, or above national averages – and while we treat many complex cases and put the needs of our patients as high as our drive for strong success rates, we’re proud to perform above the national averages in many areas.
Success rates are usually presented by the stage of treatment a patient has reached, and measured by the stage reached during pregnancy.
Measures of IVF success
The first common measure of success is a pregnancy test, referred to as a positive hCG or a biochemical pregnancy rate. The next is an ultrasound scan, referred to as the clinical pregnancy rate. Finally, clinics will also show their birth rate, which is the delivery, whether it is one baby or twins it is a single delivery, and this is known as the live birth rate.
Success rates and treatment
In our results, we'll measure our success rates against different stages of treatment. For example, we could show our birth rate per embryo transfer, or our clinical pregnancy rate per treatment cycle.
Over the years, clinics and the HFEA have used different stages to measure success rates, and it continues to evolve, such as Live Birth Rate per:
- Treatment cycles started (that is once the drugs to stimulate the ovary are commenced)
- Egg collections (this is sometimes referred to as oocyte recovery)
- Embryo transfers (this is the number of babies born per embryo transfer event)
- Embryos transferred (this is the number of babies born per actual number of embryos transferred)
What these measures mean
This approach to measuring success gives a good idea of a clinic’s ability to create and choose embryos for transfer. It also means results can’t be distorted by two embryo transfers, which can boost results but can cause a risk of multiple pregnancies and births.
There are a few things to remember about what to expect from clinic results. Some patients don’t reach the next stage of treatment, so it’s normal for success rates to get higher when they’re measured against later stages in the treatment cycle, such as the number of embryo transfer procedures.
It’s also normal for clinics to have higher biochemical pregnancy rates and lower birth rates, as unfortunately not every positive pregnancy result will lead to a baby.
To find out more about our success rates and what they mean for you, talk to one of our consultants. You can book a consultation through our contact form, or get more information by speaking to your local clinic.
