National Fertility Awareness Week: What if you need Multiple IVF Cycles?

2nd November 2016 in Infertility

This information was correct at the time of publishing. It may not reflect our current practices, prices or regulations.

Some of the biggest concerns if you need IVF are the financial implications of private treatment, especially if it takes more than one cycle for you to get pregnant.

Multiple cycles are a reality for many couples that have fertility treatment. Although IVF works the first time for some, for many others it takes more than one cycle to be successful. Often this is when fears arise about spiralling costs, with news headlines regularly featuring people who have spent thousands on repeated cycles of IVF but have no baby.

In the second of our special blogs for National Fertility Awareness Week and its focus on the reality of multiple cycles, we explain how we can help alleviate the worry of further cycles through funding; and how we support you if your first treatment fails and what steps we take to prepare for your next cycle:

How to fund multiple cycles: Pre-paid plans with a money-back guarantee

Many of our patients concerned about funding private IVF and the risk of treatment failure choose to pay for treatment using a pre-paid plan. These offer not only multiple cycles of treatment for a fixed discounted cost, but also a money-back guarantee if you don’t get pregnant.

We offer different pre-paid funding plans dependent upon your needs, through Access Fertility. The IVF/ICSI Refund plan is open to women aged 39 and under, and gives you either two or three cycles of treatment plus up to100% of your money back in the event of treatment failure, dependent upon your age. The MultiCycle plan has no refund but gives you up to two cycles of treatment, and is open to women aged 42 and under.

If you need donor eggs, we offer Access Fertility’s Donor Eggs IVF Refund plan, which is a three-cycle, 70% refund package for women aged up to 48 that need to use donor eggs.

We are also the only clinic in our region to offer our own, discounted multicycle plan for donor sperm insemination. Our consultant-developed plan offers up to three cycles of insemination using donor sperm at a discounted fixed cost.

In all instances, choosing to fund your IVF via a plan doesn’t ever affect treatment recommendation. Your tailored treatment plan remains the same no matter how you choose to pay.

Starting your next cycle after treatment failure

If your first cycle fails, we begin a thorough review of every aspect of your treatment. A negative outcome is always assessed in detail by our specialist consultant team, with a one-to-one meeting scheduled with your consultant to discuss findings. There could be any number of factors why on this occasion it didn’t work, and often it can be difficult to identify one specific reason why the cycle has failed. Factors such as age, lifestyle (weight, smoking and alcohol intake for example), sperm quality, egg quality, embryo quality and embryo transfer can all have bearing on the outcome.

We look to see if there are any changes to treatment protocol we can make, and give you a realistic idea of likely future chances of success. You’re also again both offered additional support and counselling so you can decide your next steps together.

Counselling

Many people dealing with infertility just want someone to listen who understands the impact it has, especially in the event of treatment failure and needing to try again.

It affects both you and your partner equally, but you may have different feelings that you’re struggling to express for fear of causing upset. Counselling is a vital part of the fertility treatment journey, much valued and relied upon by our patients to help them through. Counselling sessions are included in your treatment cycles, you can see our counsellors at any time if you need to – separately or together with your partner.

Our counselling team has many years of expertise in supporting couples coping with infertility, you can talk to them in confidence and in private – nothing you say is ever shared with your consultant and clinic team.

Find out more

If you’d like to know more about the reassurance of a pre-paid plan to fund multiple cycles of treatment, explore the plans here. If you’re interested in fertility treatment with us, speak to our Patient Advisors on 0161 300 2737 or apply online here and we’ll book you an appointment.

In our next blog for National Fertility Awareness Week, we’ll talk about male fertility. Men are just as likely as women to suffer from fertility issues; we shine the spotlight on its causes and our treatments to help.

Last updated: 20th January 2020