Every year, thousands of people in Belgium choose IVF. Together they make up to 40,000 attempts, De Tijd outlines. These are physically and mentally taxing processes that can take years and can be accompanied by side effects due to hormone therapy, sometimes painful egg punctures and stress. Only one in three women will have a child after a first IVF attempt. Often several attempts are required and the process starts all over again.
De Tijd and De Morgen obtained the latest report from the College for Reproductive Medicine. The differences between the eighteen centers appear to be large.
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High level
Experts emphasize that the overall level of Belgian fertility medicine is very high, but some are concerned about these different results. “For centers that score below average, we must check whether this is the case year after year, and whether quality improvement is possible,” says Willem Verpoest, the chairman of the Belgian Association for Reproductive Medicine (BSRM), in De Tijd.
An indicator in the report looks at the chance of having a child per fresh embryo transferred in the first cycle, in women younger than 36. “A good indicator for the quality of your IVF lab,” says fertility doctor Herman Tournaye (VUB) in De Tomorrow. That chance averages 33.8 percent, but varies from just over 15 percent to more than 45 percent.
In one center, more than 10 percent twins were born after IVF. “This indicates that two embryos are often transferred. Such a thing is allowed, but we try to do as little as possible because a twin pregnancy entails major health risks,” says Diane De Neubourg, the head of the fertility center at the University Hospital Antwerp, in De Tijd.
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Sensitive
It still sounds sensitive that the document is now public. The results per center are not public in our country. The hospitals only see their own results and know their place in that ranking.
But doctors fear that patients will base their choice of IVF center on this, but the data is not reliable enough for that, says Dominic Stoop, the chairman of the College for Reproductive Medicine, in De Tijd.
For example, the patient population is not mapped out. “Some centers may help more smoking or obese patients. We know that these target groups have less chance of having a child,” Stoop said in De Tijd. The size of a center also plays a role, De Neubourg points out in the newspaper. “At centers that only perform a hundred treatments per year, the outcomes for some patients with a poorer prognosis will fluctuate more than at centers that perform hundreds.”
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The BSRM is setting up a new quality measurement and involving the government and foreign experts. “The aim is to arrive at a number of good and supported quality indicators, which can be monitored by an independent organization. This should impose improvement measures and deadlines on hospitals,” says Verpoest in De Tijd.
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