private or public fertility clinic

Any comments/advice on whether to go private or public for fertility advice/treatment... particularly interested in peoples experiences in Wellington.

Cheers

It really depends on what you're looking at, too. In our case, we would see the same people whether we were paying for it ourselves or not. I imagine it's like that in most places - I haven't heard of clinics that only do private? Although I could be wrong. The initial appointments were the same cost to us if we self-referred or waited for my Dr to refer us (so we just self-referred to save time). My rounds on clomid couldn't be publicly funded, so we just paid ourselves. So for the first six-eight months, it didn't make a difference either way, if you're at that point.

Once it was apparent that clomid wasn't doing the trick for us, we had to start making some decisions about public/private treatment. As I said before, the same Drs would be doing the treatment, it was all a question of how fast it could be done. Your Drs will explain the waiting list times for you when you're at that point (if you are now, they probably will have?) We could have waited for about 12 months for public IVF, or started next cycle private. Another option for us was IUI using the same drugs they use to get you producing eggs for IVF - the public waiting list for that was shorter. The waiting list and options will vary depending on where you are and what complications you have, though.

Edited by Hopes

Also I started using clomphine through my Ob/gyn and I have to say I felt FA had a much more systematic way of going about it. The blood tests were quickly able to tell I wasn't consistently responding to it, and we quickly moved onto stronger drugs (that also had spurious response rates).