Province’s main fertility clinic to move and expand
The province’s only assisted reproduction clinic is preparing to move and expand to meet growing demand.
Dr. Allison Case, medical director of the Assisted Reproductive Technology at the University of Saskatchewan (ARTUS) Centre, and partner Dr. Adrian Gamelin are moving the practice out of Royal University Hospital into a pri- vate clinic downtown. They hope to open the doors to the new Aurora Reproductive Care clinic by early spring.
“We just recognized in the years that we’ve been doing this that the demand was increasing and we just weren’t able to meet the demand that was out there in the location we’re at right now,” Case said. At the ARTUS facility, the wait times are significant — it can be 10 months before a woman referred by a gynecologist has a consultation at ARTUS, and possibly another six months before treatment begins. Case believes patients who choose in vitro fertilization (IVF) would be better served having access to treatment within six months of a referral.
“I know there’s many patients who are leaving the province to access the treatment because it’s not sufficiently available here,” Case said.
Each round of treating a woman to stimulate egg production and release, egg retrieval, fertilization outside of the body and re-implantation of the embryos is called a “cycle” of IVF. In 2006, ARTUS did 120 cycles of fresh and frozen embryos and by 2012, the number had jumped to 215.
Within a couple of years, Case would like to expand the practice from the 150 fresh cycles done this year to at least 400 a year.
Anticipating a private fertility clinic might be on the horizon, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan adopted standards for assisted reproduction facilities at its September council meeting. Like a private surgical centre, the new facility will have to be inspected and approved by the college before it can opens its doors.
The upcoming expansion of service is welcome news to at least one family who’s been through several cycles of IVF. Humboldt couple Lisa and Blair Niekamp are now proud parents to five-week-old Slade — after 13 years trying to conceive.
On March 7, when a Calgary fertility clinic called to tell her she’d finally had a positive pregnancy test, she had to sit down, crying and shaking.
“I said, ‘No way, are you sure?’ I said, “Read me everything you have on that piece of paper,’ ” Lisa recalled.
Both Lisa and Blair have fertility problems and sought medical assistance in Calgary, then ARTUS in Saskatoon, then again in Calgary earlier this year. The couple returned to the regional fertility program in Calgary because the program had a higher success rate and was using some techniques not available in Saskatoon, Lisa said.
The care at ARTUS was excel- lent, Lisa said, but the facility has little privacy and a room full of people struggling to conceive must watch pregnant women in labour walk past down the hospital hall.
“I think this will be great if it’s somewhere fresh and they can accommodate a lot more, that would be fantastic,” Niekamp said.
Many more Canadian couples are seeking medical help to conceive than a decade ago, according to the Canadian Assisted Reproduction Technologies Register. In 2001, CARTR counted nearly 7,900 reproductive cycles performed at 19 Canadian clinics and by 2010, that number jumped to nearly 15,900 cycles at 28 clinics.
Statistics Canada reports 15 per cent of couples trying to conceive in 2009-10 sought medical assistance — that’s about 380,000 couples.
Yet Canada has among the lowest rates of assisted reproduction of industrialized countries, according to Dr. Anthony Cheung, chair of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada’s reproductive endocrinology and infertility committee.
Cheung, also medical director of Grace Fertility Centre in Vancouver, says treatment rates around the world correlate with how wide- ly available the service is and how much of the cost is borne by government.
Saskatchewan Health covers the initial costs of diagnosing infertility and also the cost of artificial insemination. However, any manipulation of sperm or eggs that occurs outside the body is not considered medically necessary and, therefore, not covered.
Niekamp spent about $10,000 on her last cycle of fertility treatment, plus another $1,000 to stay in a Calgary hotel for two weeks.
Women are spending longer in school and training for work, and often delaying pregnancy until their careers are established, Cheung said.
“Our society, in some way, we want equality,” Cheung said. “But in actual fact, it’s more difficult for women to take time off without loss of seniority ... That’s not going to be solved by a medical approach.”
Society could avoid some of the demand for IVF treatment if social policies supported women having children earlier, he said. A woman’s fertility drops dramatically starting in her mid-30s, Cheung said. At least two-thirds of his patients are women age 37 or older, he says.