Hundreds of patients had IVF treatment delayed by COVID-19, survey finds

It took Amber Boniface 11 rounds of IVF to conceive her son.

When she and her husband felt ready to start the gruelling process again and try to give him a sibling, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, delaying Amber’s private IVF treatment by eight months.

“For me, waiting eight months, I was already 37 and when you’re 37 eight months is a long time in fertility. And now we’re a year-and-a-half down the line, I’m a year-and-a-half older, more than that now, and we’re still not anywhere,” Amber, from Leatherhead, says.

“It’s that time pressure that you have when you’re in late 30s that really kind of added to the stress and the worry,” she adds.

A survey of nearly 400 patients by the charity Fertility Network UK found that COVID delayed IVF treatment for more than half of the respondents, with patients saying they had to undergo repeat tests because many were out of date by the time they could access treatments.

And even a short delay can diminish the chances of IVF being successful for some women, experts say.

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“There has been a delay in getting access to diagnoses and treatments in some parts of the country and that has caused a lot of stress particularly for women who are older and have a diminished egg reserve, when time is of the essence,” says Dr Geeta Nargund, medical director at CREATE Fertility.

“That has put stress on them because they are concerned about their egg reserve going down and their chances of having a baby with their own eggs,” she says.

The UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority says that while the clinics had to shut for a period of time, the priority has been to ensure that fertility treatment can continue safely for as many patients as possible.

For Lauren and Nick Schofield from Lancashire, NHS treatment was delayed by four months, but when it resumed, Lauren had to attend all appointments alone because of COVID protocols.

“It’s quite overwhelming, I mean one of my appointments was when they collect your eggs, which is a full procedure when they put you under anaesthetic. And for somebody who had never been under anaesthetic I had to go through that myself,” Lauren says.

“All I really wanted was to have Nick there to just hold my hand and say, because he’s been under anaesthetic a few times, to just go – ‘you’ll be fine, you’ll wake up in half an hour and you’ll be fine’,” she adds.

Pandemic measures also meant that the couple weren’t given an in-person demonstration by the nurse on how to prepare injections and administer them, which was the standard procedure before the pandemic, but instead had to rely on instructions from a booklet.

“It was just so hard to try and just read that without having a nurse to go through it and say – all right this is how you do it, that’s not how you do it, you’ve got to do it this time, and with this temperature stuff like that, it’s kind of hard,” says Lauren.

The couple were lucky, and Lauren got pregnant after three attempts.

But for many others, pandemic delays meant diminishing chances of having a much-wanted child.

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