Ranked: Best and worst NSW IVF clinics revealed

Couples desperate for a child are spending $5,000 out of pocket on a single IVF cycle. Now their chances of having a baby depend on where they go for help. Search and see the full list.

Exclusive: These are the results Australia’s fertility doctors don’t want you to see – a league table of the success rates of the nation’s IVF clinics.

At Australia’s best clinics nearly two in every three younger couples trying for an IVF baby have their dreams come true a News Corp analysis has found.

However, at poorer performing clinics only one in four couples get a baby. And, among older mums, while some clinics have success rates of over 42 per cent others deliver a baby less than ten per cent of the time.

With many couples paying over $10,000 for each IVF cycle and being left out of pocket $5,000 researching the best providers is a critical exercise.

Just as critical is knowing how your age can affect your chances of having a baby and a handy tool on the government run Yourivfsuccess website lets you explore this.

News Corp analysis of Yourivfsuccess.com.au data shows the most successful IVF clinics Australia-wide are Genea’s Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra clinics.

Among women aged under 35 success rates are 64.79 per cent, 60 per cent and 59.42 per cent at these clinics.

For women aged 35-42 the most successful clinics are Monash IVF Rockhampton (42.86 per cent), Cairns Fertility Centre (35.9 per cent) and Genea Liverpool (35.79 per cent).

The Monash and Cairns clinics treated only a small number of patients (less than 70) and this means just a few more, or less, births can have a dramatic effect on their ranking.

Mark Bowman, medical director, at Genea Fertility. Picture: Renee Nowytarger Photography

In NSW Genea had five clinics among the top ten best performers.

The most successful clinic in NSW for women aged 35-42 was Genea Liverpool where 35.79 per cent of women had a baby after an egg retrieval cycle in 2018-19, Fertility First (31.58 per cent) and Genea CBD (30.22 per cent).

The top two clinics carried out fewer than 300 egg retrieval cycles which could skew results.

Among larger clinics treating over 1,000 women Genea CBD was top with a success rate of 30.22 per cent.

Results for other larger clinics were cut price clinic Westmead Fertility Centre which charges out of pockets of just $1,000 (27.43 per cent) IVF Australia Eastern suburbs (22.97 per cent) IVF Australia North Shore (20.72 per cent) Adora fertility Sydney (19.57 per cent)

SEE THE LATEST 2023 IVF CLINIC SUCCESS RESULTS  FOR NSW IN OUR SPECIAL ANNUAL IVF SERIES.

Genea’s medical director Mark Bowman said the secrets to the company’s success included performing egg collection when it needed to be done, not on a predetermined day of the week and not giving more drugs than were needed.

“We have a unique technological system, the incubators we use, the freezing systems we use the culture media, the fluid embryos grow in, that’s all proprietary and in Australia is exclusive to Genea because we spent a lot of R&D, building up those products which sell around the world,” he said.

Monash IVF’s Dr Ross Turner said pre-implantation Genetic testing of embryos helped select the embryo which is most likely to implant and least likely to miscarry because of a major chromosomal problem like Down syndrome or Trisomy 13.

“We have a high percentage of single embryo transfers and a good group of very experienced or highly trained dedicated scientists who are very good at and certainly doing embryo biopsy,” he said.

“If there’s a dip in the success rates, there’s a full investigation undertaken to see what’s going on,” he said.

The performance of IVF clinics is measured in four ways by independent University of NSW experts and couples can search the success rates of individual clinics on a government run website called Yourivfsuccess.com.au.

But getting an overall picture is complicated and involves multiple searches if you want to compare all clinics across Australia or even in your state.

Using the data behind this website we were able to produce a league table of IVF success rates based on measure 1.

The measure uses the latest available data to track the number of live births that resulted from the eggs (fresh or frozen) collected from women in 2018 that were fertilised and implanted as embryos in 2018 and 2019. It includes babies that were born in 2020.

However, we have learned the Fertility Society of Australia New Zealand is trying to make it hard for couples to find out about the performance of clinics.

The society bans providers from listing their rating on a government success rate tool on their websites.

“You might fail your accreditation if you try and replicate your YourIVF success rates on your own web page,” Genea medical director Mark Bowman told News Corp.

“I’m concerned that we have a system in this country that finds it too convenient to hide lack of performance, and doesn’t allow the representation of good performance, and that’s my concern,” he said.

Clinics are also banned from providing links to news stories such as this one on their websites, he said.

The top Baby Doctors from the Royal Hospital for Women. Head of Reproductive Medicine Professor Bill Ledger. Picture: John Appleyard

Professor Bill Ledger from the Royal Hospital for Women who is on the advisory board for the government’s yourivfsuccess website said one of the reasons for measuring performance was to “help the poorly performing clinics do better,” he said.

Clinics voluntarily provide their information to measure performance and if top performing clinics were able to use their ratings in advertising many poorer performing clinics might cease taking part in performance monitoring, he said.

“If some of the clinics at the top get too shouty about it, the ones that aren’t at the top then in future years withheld the data and the whole thing will break down,” he said.

University NSW Professor Georgina Chambers developed the website said there was a concern that league tables may create perverse incentives for providers.

“If a clinic only cares about their ranking they may refuse to treat women with a poor prognosis,” she said.

“In publishing clinical success rates you need to be careful you don’t create an incentive where only the women with the best prognosis get treated,” she said.

Monash IVF’s Dr Ross Turner Monash IVF agreed that “the danger of a league table is that the clinics will want to have their best results up there. So they’ll only treat good prognostic patients. So it would mean those patients with poor prognosis may maybe be declined or discouraged to go to those clinics, that’s the problem with league tables.”

PRIVATE EQUITY TAKEOVER OF IVF

Australia’s largest IVF businesses are being taken over by private equity firms which snatched up the number-one provider Virtus Health and number-three provider Genea in recent months.

Royal Hospital for Women specialist Professor Bill Ledger raised concerns about the firms’ objectives, after watching them move in on Australia’s childcare and aged care sectors.

“I’m not sure that private equity are the best people to talk about compassion. They worry me,” he said.

The firms are attracted to the sectors are almost guaranteed taxpayer funded income in the form of Medicare, aged care and childcare subsidies.

Evidence to the recent Aged Care Royal Commission by University of Technology Sydney researcher Marie dela Rama said “the reason for entry by private equity managers into the sector is motivated by pure and simple profit, underwritten by a bottomless pit of government subsidies”.

In US, a study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators found nursing homes acquired by private equity companies saw an increase in emergency room visits and hospitalisations among long-stay residents and an uptick in Medicare costs.

In Europe and the UK an investigation found private equity aged care home groups were often forced to serve “shareholder loans” with high interest rates in some cases making them technically insolvent.

Often the aged care homes were stripped of their real estate and were forced to rent them back. Profits of care home groups were transferred to parent holdings in offshore financial centres such as Luxembourg or Jersey.

Last month, Melbourne based BGH Capital offered $684m to acquire Virtus Health, beating off a takeover offer from UK private equity firm CapVest.

In recent weeks Liverpool Partners moved to take over both Genea for $202 million and cut price fertility clinic Adora for $30.5 million.

In March private equity firm Liverpool Partners bought Adora Fertility for $30.5 million. Speculation is rife number two provider, Monash IVF, will soon face its own take over bid.

In May, Monash IVF moved on Perth based IVF provider PIVET Medical Centre.