I am very glad the Government
of India has finally woken up and decided to regulate IVF clinics by passing
the ART Bill .
While some IVF clinics are excellent, a number of shoddy
IVF clinics have cropped up in the last few years , and every street corner in
most towns seems to have an IVF specialist who promises high success rates !
Sadly, these doctors don't have the required experience and
expertise to be able to provide IVF treatment properly .
These clinics are usually run by gynecologists
who have never done a single IVF cycle during their medical training. Because
they think IVF is highly profitable, they do a one-week diploma or certificate
course, and hang out their shingle, ready to attract unwary patients.
Even worse, the IVF Labs in these
clinics are run by technicians who aren't expert embryologists, as a result of
which they aren't able to culture the embryos properly to Day 5. They often
kill the embryos when freezing them, thus making a bad situation even worse.
The problem is that because the documentation is so poor, and because these IVF clinics refuse to
share medical records, it's impossible for patients to determine the reason why
their IVF cycle failed.
Patients are not in a position to be able to judge the
difference between a good IVF clinic and a bad IVF clinic , so the regulation
is definitely a step in the right direction , because
it lays down the minimum equipment an IVF clinic needs to have.
However, an one important piece of information is missing
in this Act. The Government should have made patient education compulsory for
all IVF clinics, not just in the form of counselling , but also of explicitly
saying that the patient's IVF medical records are the property of the patient ,
and the doctor needs by law to hand over the medical records at the end of the
IVF cycle to the patient . They should also have specified that the records
should always routinely include photos of the transferred embryos, so
that patients have documentary tangible evidence of the quality of the care
they have received. Incidentally, this is a global practice which all good IVF
clinics all over the world routinely follow.
This simple step would have been great for patients ,
because then they could have had much more confidence in the quality of care
they would have received . It would also be good for good IVF clinics , which
routinely provide embryo photos currently, because they know that the only
thing an IVF clinic can do is produce good quality embryos, and they are proud
to do this, because this transparency increases the trust patients have in the
clinic.
More importantly, this simple step would ensure that the
bad IVF clinics will be forced to stop providing IVF treatment , because they will not be able to comply
with these regulations , because they
aren't capable of producing good quality embryos.
This one simple step would put patients first , and helps the quality of IVF care in all Indian IVF clinics to become world class
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