Understanding fertility success rates

What you need to know

When seeking the right fertility clinic, one of the factors that will guide your decision is a clinic’s success rate figures. However, making sense of the success rates reported by each of the fertility clinics is often difficult for a number of reasons, for example:

  • The terms used are not easy to understand if you are not familiar with the world of fertility treatments;
  • Fertility clinics often use slightly different ways of presenting their success rates; so it is often like trying to compare “apples with pears”;
  • The success rates for a particular clinic may reflect the fact that they treat more complex cases – so the success results are more a measure of the variety of patients treated, rather than the true quality of the clinic and their fertility experts. For example, fertility clinics which treat a high number of NHS-funded patients, may have a higher success rate, this is due to the lower average age of a fertility patient referred via the NHS.

We’re here to help resolve the confusion, by providing you with information on how to interpret the success rate results.

How to find information you need?

Navigating your way through the statistics provided by fertility clinics can be heavy-going. As well as an individual fertility clinic’s web site, the following sources are a good starting point to helping you find the information you need (Read more).

How is “success” defined?

Whether reported on Gynii Me’s, the HFEA’s, or another website or source, the reported success rates are usually based on a number of popular measures. Each measure is designed to give you an overall idea of the success of the treatment for a clinic; it is not easy to say which is the most reliable or best measure.

To help you work out what it all means, we have included a brief guide to terms (or expressions) used when describing fertility treatment success rates (Read more).

Making sense of success rates

Becoming familiar with the way success rate statistics work can be tricky and also rather daunting. Looking at some simple examples of success rate and how they are derived, helps you to understand how to interpret the results presented by a fertility clinic (Read more).