Embryos don't know it's the weekend: Why a seven day service is key to IVF success

Embryos have no idea what day of the week it is let alone the time of the day – neither do your ovaries. Embryos are intrinsically designed to grow at the rate they grow. Sometimes quality control makes them stop growing yet they are designed to keep growing.

Embryos in a lab or beyond can fail on any given day. As IVF practitioners, our role is to facilitate them and you to the best possible end result.

Or at least it should be!

IVF practitioners should commit to an approach that provides a face to face or embryologist to embryo service whenever it is biologically necessary. This provides patients with the best care, not just patients whose bodily responses fall into the typical five day ‘working week’.

If certain clinical services are going to be offered in a fertility clinic, it should be an all or nothing approach. It can’t be that a clinic offers the service on some days and not others. There is no pause button for an embryo or on follicles growing in ovaries that allows a clinic to take Sunday off!

Having said that, there are many things in IVF that are safely manipulated to a certain day and time without detrimental effects. Yet there are several activities that must be done at very specific times and days – or in a certain way – to avoid poor or compromised results and outcomes.

If a clinic can’t do what's best for everyone then it shouldn’t offer it to all. It's not the patients fault that a clinic doesn't want to or can’t work the weekends.

Far too many times I hear of treatments being compromised by the so called working days of the week.

Examples of failings in patient care when there's an inconsistent commitment to a seven day service.

Patient A chose a clinic because she wanted to have PGT-A testing of embryos. Her egg collection was on a Tuesday and so day 5 of embryo development day was on a Sunday. The embryologist working the weekend wasn't biopsy trained and so the patient's beautiful day 5 blastocyst stage embryo was frozen. Later in the week it was subjected to an unnecessary yet necessary thaw, biopsy and a re-freeze when the correctly skilled staff were working! 😱

Patient B had an egg collection on a Monday and was told that she would therefore need to have her fresh transfer on a Thursday or Friday at the day 3 (D3) or day 4 (D4) embryo stage. She had 10 embryos in the lab and so the transfer took place before the ideal blastocyst stage, and thus ideal embryo selection was not achieved. All because there was no doctor available to do the transfer on the Saturday. 😱

Patient C who needed an extra day or two of stimulation, had an egg collection on the Friday because the clinic did not perform collections on a Saturday or Sunday and the Monday would have been too late. She collected 10 eggs but only 5 were mature. We cannot know for sure that the extra day or two of stimulation would not have changed this poor maturity rate. 😱

Patient D who had a scan on day 9 of stimulation (a Thursday) and had to keep stimming. It was a bank holiday weekend and they were not scanned again until the Tuesday – now day 14 – as there was no scanning on the weekends. By Tuesday it was all too late and the cycle was unrecoverable. This was their only NHS cycle of treatment. 😱

Your treatment and potential outcome should not be compromised by a clinic's desire to work certain hours of the week. And certain types of treatment should not be offered if they cannot be offered equally – and in the best way – to everyone.

So here are some questions to ask a clinic:

• Do you run a seven day service?
• Is your service adjusted by bank holiday weekends?
• Do you do egg collections/embryo transfers every day of the week?
• Are all weekends covered by PGT-A skilled embryologists?

There are more questions you can ask a clinic. 10 essential questions to ask during your IVF consultation.

Please share this with anyone who is going through IVF as this is an important, common, and often overlooked problem.

I'm curious to hear more examples of where this has happened. 💜

I offer private patient embryology consultations. I can:

• Help people who are completely new to the IVF process feel more empowered
• Discuss the basics of fertility treatment and the many options available
• Review embryology treatment plans and results prior to starting IVF treatment
• Review previous IVF cycle embryo timelapse videos
• Review pre-implantation embryo genetic testing (PGT) results
• Help explore options when there is genetic disease in the family
• Discuss and explore donor sperm options
• Plus more

Send me a message if you'd like to set up a consultation.

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emma at emmatheembryologist dot com