Invitation to my Clinical Commissioning Group service and policy review

[NsKaz]

Hi all,

I've had a letter from my clinic inviting me to my local CCG service and policy review. They are inviting couples to have their say and influence on improving services and proposed policy changes.

Has anyone ever been to one of these before? I'm in a bit of a fragile state ATM following my BFN (though it's not til the end of the month) but when I spoke to my mum about it she was like you absolutely have to go - if you have the chance to influence things and make it better for someone else in your position you should. I know she's right but still feel worried about it.

Any advice would be gravely appreciated as well as any suggestions on what to say!

Thanks lovelies xx

[Lizzielizzielizzie]

Please go if you can face it. These bean counters need to see the real hurt and hardship that their cuts are causing. Infertile people are a minority and we are being discriminated against. I bet their proposed changes will end up with fewer people being eligible for NHS ivf.

In my area, I would be pointing out that holding the infertility/gynaecology appointments in the same place as the pregnancy ultrasound appointments (sharing a waiting room) is particularly awful. I would also point out that treating cancer patients as a special group (often they are protected from cuts to ivf services) is grossly unfair... endometriosis is also a life limiting illness, it's just less well known. If cancer patients are protected, endo sufferers should be too, and so should people with history of ectopic and people with no fallopian tubes and men with low sperm counts. These are all illnesses. One illness shouldn't be a special case just because the word cancer makes people emotive.

[lau_har1]

We was invited to our local CCG meeting back in March as they were talking about removing the funding for IVF.. we went and I felt a lot more emotional than I thought I would be, I suppose having to actually talk out loud to a room full of people about infertility problems and also have other couples around us going through the same thing, just hit a spot.

It was very interesting.. there was about 4 different speakers from our CCG giving all the funding nonsense and how much they spent annually on IVF funding, then they gave us an opportunity to ask questions. Then they split themselves up to come to our tables to do a 'brain storm' of ideas basically.

They informed us that it cost them around 800k a year to fund IVF and one lady shouted out that amount is the price of a house in London.

Unfortunately even after public meetings they have stopped the funding, but luckily for myself and my partner we just got on the list for 3 cycles. They did say that other CCG's across the country will be cutting IVF funding, which is such a disgrace!

I will never ever be able to understand how they can cut this funding, yet still fund obese people for bariatric surgery on the NHS. I think it's absolutely disgusting how they see people like that a 'priority' and deserve funding over people like us that would do anything to naturally have babies, but just sometimes need extra help from fertility experts and science.

The most shocking thing for me was one of the guys at our meeting actually helped create IVF all those years ago, then was part of taking it away.

I would definitely recommend going x