Confidentiality
We keep all details of your treatment absolutely confidential, and will tell no one without your permission. At the same time, it is a good idea for your GP (your family doctor) to know about your treatment, and it is best for you to tell him/her. You can then discuss with your doctor what sort of record you want kept in your medical notes.

Communicating information outside the Unit
With the introduction of the Human & Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990, we are no longer allowed to disclose any information regarding your treatment to anybody outside the Unit without your written consent. Before your treatment commences, the doctor at the Unit will discuss this with you and you will be asked to sign a Disclosure of Information form. This will allow us to communicate information to persons who may be involved in your treatment such as your GP.

It has always been our preferred policy to keep GPs fully informed of any treatment that their patients are having with us, in line with good medical practice and as directed by the General Medical Council. We believe that this communication is important for our patients’ well being and is indispensable where the GPs are collaborating with the treatment, prescribing drugs or giving injections. We have also always respected the right of patients to have a say in what is told to their medical practitioner and to their gynaecologist.

Information sent to the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority
The Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA) is a government body that regulates infertility treatment in the UK. If you have any queries about the information held by the Unit or the HFEA, confidentiality or communication, please do not hesitate to discuss it with the Unit or with the HFEA (see Useful addresses)

The HFEA keeps a confidential register of information about donors, patients and treatments. This register was set up on 1st August 1991 and therefore contains information concerning children conceived from licensed treatments from that date onwards.

As from the year 2008, people aged 16+ (if contemplating marriage) or 18 who ask the HFEA, will be told whether or not they were born as a result of licensed assisted conception treatment, and if so, whether they are related to the person they want to marry.

As the law now stands no information about patients, their children and donors will be given out by the Authority, under any circumstances other than those outlined above. The names of children are not collected. The current law does not allow people who apply for information from the register to know the identity of current or past donors*, or of patients and their children. It is a criminal offence to disclose that information.

The kind of information the Authority now collects, relates to a donor’s appearance, interests and occupation. In the future, Parliament might decide that adults who contact the Authority and learn that they were born as a result of treatment using a donor might be given some information about that donor.

*If a child were to sue the clinic for damages if that child were born with a disability as a result of a donor’s failure to disclose inherited disease, a court might require the HFEA to disclose the donor’s identity under the Congenital Disabilities (Civil liabilities) Act 1976.