Australia’s IVF accreditation system fails to pass the pub test, a government minister has said, as discussions continue following multiple embryo mix-ups at one of the nation’s largest fertility providers.
State and territory health ministers met with their federal counterpart on Friday, where it was agreed that a rapid nationwide review would begin to consider establishing an independent accreditation body.
It comes after Monash IVF revealed staff had transferred the wrong embryo to a woman at a Melbourne clinic last week, following a similar blunder involving a separate Monash patient in Brisbane.
Victorian Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas said she hoped the establishment of an independent body could occur immediately, but claimed it was met with pushback from Queensland.
“We got to move quickly,” she told reporters.
“It’s concerning … there may well be more errors that we don’t know about. And that is because the body that currently accredits fertility care providers is made up of fertility care providers.
“That’s why I find Queensland’s position so perplexing.”
A spokesman for Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls said the minister had “advocated for an informed understanding” of the accreditation and regulation framework.
“Health ministers decided that Queensland would lead work to understand the issues better and to ensure a strategy would be well informed,” the spokesman said.
The three-month review will consider whether the state regulatory schemes are fit for purpose when it comes to safety and quality.
The IVF industry is primarily regulated by states and territories.
Clinics must be licensed to operate by the Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee.
Ms Thomas said the main issue for her was how fertility care was accredited.
“It simply doesn’t pass the pub test that the people that provide the service are also the ones that determine who provides the service,” she said.
“We have work to do there.”
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler, who used IVF to welcome his third child, described the two recent embryo mix-ups as “frankly shocking”.
“As governments, we’ve got a responsibility to see whether there are better levels of regulation that should be put in place, and to inject some confidence back into a system that delivers such joy to so many thousands of families every year,” he told ABC Radio.
Monash IVF chief executive Michael Knaap resigned on Thursday after it was revealed staff at a Melbourne laboratory gave a patient one of her embryos, instead of one from her partner as intended.
An investigation is under way into how it happened.
The company, which has a presence across Australia, apologised to the couple, while the Victorian Health Regulator has also launched an investigation.
Monash revealed in April that a woman at a Brisbane facility was incorrectly impregnated with another patient’s embryo, which was blamed on “human error”.
The mistake was picked up after the child was born when the birth parents asked for their remaining embryos to be transferred elsewhere and an additional embryo was unexpectedly found in storage.
Former Monash director Gab Kovacs, who was involved with developing earlier IVF guidelines, told AAP the mix-up was a “very rare occurrence”.
“However, with 100,000 cycles of IVF in Australia, even with this occurring very, very rarely, it is inevitable that this will happen,” Mr Kovacs said.
“It is due to human error and this cannot be eliminated.
“The two incidents happened in two separate clinics, 2000km apart … (involving) different personnel, different lab managers.”
About 20,000 babies conceived by IVF are born in Australia each year.
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