IVF Baby Boom At NHS Hospital In Bristol

By Isabel Webster, West Of England Correspondent

The UK's "best IVF centre in the NHS" is celebrating as 750 babies, conceived at the centre, enjoy their first Christmas.

The Bristol Centre for Reproductive Medicine (BCRM) produced around 450 live babies in 2012 using various forms of IVF and around a further 300 babies with the use of other fertility treatments like surgery or hormone therapy.

So there was plenty of cause for celebration at the Southmead Hospital centre as some of those infants were brought together for a special Christmas party.

New parents Steven and Natasha Watts had tried to conceive naturally for six years and described the process as "heart-breaking", as those around them had successful pregnancies.

"We both so badly wanted to be parents - it was really hard."

They were offered a relatively new fertility treatment known as ICSI (intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection).

A needle 1/7th the width of a human hair is used to isolate a single sperm which is then injected into a healthy egg and if successful an embryo is then imbedded back into the womb.

This more delicate and accurate form of IVF was successful and Natasha gave birth to healthy twins Olivia and Matthew.

"This is our family now - it's complete. What more could you ask for?"

Lee Booth and Marie Black described feeling "devastated" after discovering their chances of conceiving were extremely slim.

But they spent 18 months receiving help from the centre which eventually resulted in their daughter, Grace.

Lee explained: "We conceived on a frozen cycle and the chances of that are quite slim so we just thought get it out the way and we could focus on the next cycle. So it was quite a surprise when we found out it had worked."

Marie admitted she had been up in the night to take a pregnancy test.

"I did a test, expecting it to be negative. I said to Lee 'Are there two lines on that?'. I just couldn't believe it. I think I did 10 tests in one week!"

The couple are now considering donating some of Marie's eggs as a gift to hopeful-mothers-to-be who can sometimes spend five years waiting for a donor.

Valentine Akande, centre director and lead consultant for fertility services at the BCRM, has seen the chances for couples with fertility problems get better during the course of his career and believes there is good cause to be optimistic about developments in the field in the future.

He said: "At the centre we offer blastocyst transfer when we grow the embryo in the lab beyond what is normally possible and this has improved success rates remarkably. Success rates can only get better. We're not yet at perfection but hopefully at some stage in the future we'll be in excess of 70%.

"I'm very proud of the team here. We are the best NHS IVF hospital in the UK and there's virtually no category of infertility that we're not able to approach or treat."

The centre is also one of the first in the UK to use IVF Witness, which uses tiny radio frequency IDs to automatically track all samples in their laboratories.

An alarm is sounded if cells from mismatched couples are ever in the same workspace.

It's expensive technology, but it eliminates the risk of mix-ups, which have happened at other fertility clinics around the country, and allows the doctors and scientists to focus on helping couples fulfil their ambitions of becoming parents.

Mr Akande said: "At this time of year, which is all about loved ones, it is great to know that we're helping parents start a longed-for family. It's a wonderful privilege."

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