How we chose our IVF clinic abroad
I thought it might be helpful to write a post explaining how we went about finding an IVF clinic abroad. I'm definitely not saying this is the only way to do it, it's just what we did... maybe someone might find it helpful! If you want to skip the long, rambling part of this post, feel free to jump to the end of the post, where I summarise everything :)
After visiting the Fertility Show in London, we knew that we were leaning more towards treatment abroad, rather than in the UK. This was purely down to cost, and how we were treated by UK vs abroad clinics at the show. We already knew that Greece was one option, as a good friend of ours had used a clinic in Athens. We also found out from another good friend who lives in Prague, that this was another highly recommended location for IVF treatment abroad. I wanted to do a little more digging first though, before committing to a specific clinic.
I was a bit nervous about going abroad for treatment at first... let's face it, you normally hear all kinds of horror stories about cosmetic surgery going wrong when people have treatment abroad. If we didn't have two personal recommendations, I'm not sure I would have been quite so ready to jump into it with an open mind. Thankfully we did have these recommendations though, as it got the ball rolling much quicker!
We started to search on Google for clinics in Greece, Prague and Spain first, as we had seen that these countries were highly recommended for successful IVF treatment at competitive prices. I created a good old trusty Excel spreadsheet, to make it easier to compare the information that we were looking through - when you start looking through IVF information, it pretty much makes no sense whatsoever! You see things like ICSI, PGT testing, day 5 blastocyst... honestly, my head was spinning by the time we went through things the first time. Here’s an example of the information I added to the spreadsheet:
We started by listing all of the clinics that we found, and then went through the reviews for each one to see what positive and negative things people had to say. As well as the rating, we made a note of any particularly glowing, or bad reviews, to come back to later.
Next, we went through any pricing information we could find, and made a note of this. It's quite difficult to compare clinics on pricing (although it will give you a rough idea), as a lot of the time the treatment protocol is very tailored to the patient depending on the reason for infertility, and every clinic does things differently.
It was then a case of going through and shortlisting what clinics we would like to have initial consultations with - this included the two clinics our friends recommended, in Athens and Prague. Another bonus of clinics based abroad - none of them charged for initial consultations, all of them were free via video call. For the few UK clinics we spoke to, all of them wanted to charge £400+ for an initial consultation - some did run open evening type events, that were free, but we felt that we needed a private consultation to ask about our situation more specifically.
After shortlisting, I sent an email to each clinic, requesting that we were booked in for an initial consultation. I think we contacted around five clinics in total - two in Greece, and three in Prague. We decided against Spain in the end, as we couldn't find as many positive reviews for the clinics we looked into. Some clinics got back to us really quickly, and others took slightly longer. All of them requested recent test results for a variety of things, including AMH and FHS blood test results, semen analysis results, ultrasound results of any recent scans, including an antral follicle count, and smear test results. Luckily we'd had a lot of these tests done fairly recently - a lot of clinics specified that test results couldn't be older than six months. We sent everything we had through to each clinic that asked, and then proceeded to book consultations with them.
The first consultation that we had, was with the clinic in Athens that our friend recommended to us. Sadly, the experience wasn't quite what we were hoping for... the doctor and coordinator seemed really lovely and explained everything very well, but the doctor was fairly adamant that before proceeding with IVF treatment, I would need a hysteroscopy to be performed due to the fact that I have endometriosis. Not only would this mean additional costs (around £2000), after already waiting for four years, this seemed like another unnecessary delay that might hinder rather than help. We finished the call feeling a bit deflated, and I started to worry that all of the clinics we spoke to would recommend the same thing. Luckily, all of the other clinics that we spoke to didn’t feel this was necessary, including the UK based clinic that we spoke to. All of them recommended trying IVF first, and then considering a hysteroscopy if IVF didn’t work for us on the first round.
In the end, we decided we wanted to proceed with the clinic that our friend in Prague recommended to us. We got a really good feeling from the coordinator and the doctor that we spoke to on the call, and we liked that everyone we were in contact with, spoke a good level of English. This was important to us as due to my complex medical history, I didn’t want to be in a situation that I felt was urgent, or an emergency, and not be understood by the doctor we were being treated by. Some of the other clinics we spoke to seemed lovely, but the coordinator had to translate everything to the doctor, which personally made me feel a little uneasy. Perhaps if I wasn’t a more complex medical case, this wouldn’t have bothered me as much.
It also helped that our friends live in Prague and speak Czech, they let us know that they would be happy to translate if there was any kind of emergency situation.
So to summarise...
Take a look on Google for IVF clinics abroad - It's worth taking a look at Greece, Czech Republic and Spain to start with. It's also worth having a look on Facebook at a few groups called 'IVF abroad support network', 'IVF Support Prague', 'IVF in Greece (Official)'. I didn't actually find these Facebook groups until after we had spoken to our selected clinics, but I've since found them to be a wealth of information
Create an Excel spreadsheet, or use your preferred software/notebook, to make a list of the clinics. Include things you want to compare, such as pricing, reviews, distance to the airport, distance to any hospitals (in case it's needed), and so on
Shortlist the clinics - we chose five clinics in total to get in touch with
Contact the clinics to set up initial consultations (note that they may request specific test results and medical records at the next stage - it's good if you have these to hand)
After speaking to the clinics via video call, decide whether any are standing out for you - for good or bad reasons. If you can't decide on a clinic at this point, or you didn't get a good feeling from any of them, go back to your spreadsheet/notebook etc, and see whether you would like to contact any other clinics on your list
I hope you find this helpful somehow, I know I rambled on a bit! :)