How I chose my Clinic

I’m currently seeing a few people on instagram and twitter talking about how people chose their clinic so I thought I would write about how I chose mine.

I’ve purposefully, currently not named my clinic anywhere, but thats purely down to choice and being quite early on in my treatment & journey. As I have mentioned before fertility treatment wasn’t always going to be my first choice.

I had spoken to both CARE Fertility & CREATE fertility to start with and looked at having one of their fertility MOT’s before making a decision on what my step would be. I was phoning and asking questions about them whilst still waiting for the Depo contraception to be fully out of my system, but from one of the clinics (I forget which) I’m still waiting for a call back some 18 months later…

However, this didn’t put me off, when I booked to go for the Fertilty Show I was able to look around the clinics that were there, including CARE and CREATE. There were also a lot of overseas clinics, but I made the decision that I wanted a UK based clinic based on wanting ID Release donor sperm.

In the job that I do, people buy into me, so I’m very much that type of shopper too. Which is why the Fertility Show was the best place for me to go.

In the end – after speaking to the clinics, asking questions and constantly bouncing between what would be Clinic A & Clinic B, I walked out of the Fertility show knowing that it would be ONE of those two clinics – with a preferance mainly to clinic A because it was a little bit closer to where I was based and I had friends who didn’t live too far from clinic A incase I needed a place to crash, or just somewhere to pop and see them and vent / cry / celebrate if needed.

I bounced between Clinic A & Clinic B because of how their team made me feel when I visited them at their exhibition stand – some of the others put me off because of how I felt they were “treating” me as a solo mum by choice. One clinic even gave me prices then told me that all the prices were wrong and they went up by almost £50 each item on it.

I decided on Clinic A because of the location, how the staff I spoke to, including the consultant who is now my Doctor was with me, giving me plenty of information for my journey, the jokes we had with som of the other staff on the stall, where they were in proximity to me (I travel approximately 40 minutes to my clinic) but I also went to an open evening, saw the clinic and information provided, spoke to a different consultant and some of the nursing team and decided yep – it really was the clinic for me! It just felt right.
And thats really whats important.

Any questions or problems they’ve had they’ve dealt with swiftly – they’ve answered my questions and listened to feedback where I’ve felt it necessary. They’ve got good birth rates and access to UK based donor clinics.

I’ve not had any issues with any of the staff I’ve encountered, all been super lovely including my counsellor.

Go with your gut, you need to put a lot of trust into your clinic and will be spending a lot of time there on your journey.