Have Your Say - Official Consumer Law Guidance Consultation

Earlier this year I posted about the development of new consumer law guidance for IVF clinics in the UK, to make sure clinics treat patients fairly.

The draft guidance has now been published and we now have the chance to have our say.

The important bit

You can scroll down for all the info about what the guidance is, what it’s for, the consultation as a whole - but I’m putting this at the top cos this is the bit that really matters - making sure the guidance works for us.

The detailed guidance is aimed at fertility clinics - so I asked the CMA what they most wanted to understand from patients.

Ths easiest way to take part in the consultation is to fill in this questionnaire and I’ll collate all the answers into one submission.

Please submit your answers by no later than Sunday 3 January 2021

Patient Questionnaire

INFORMATION FROM YOUR CLINIC

Do you feel you had enough information to give informed consent to your treatment? Do you think your clinic gave you the right amount of information at each stage? Is there anything they could have done differently?

OVERALL COST OF TREATMENT

Did you know what your treatment would cost when you started? Were you surprised by the final cost?

UNEXPECTED COSTS

Did you have to pay for any additional costs that you weren't expecting?

TRANSPARENCY

Is there anything you feel the clinic misled you about?

ANYTHING ELSE?

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

CONTACT DETAILS (OPTIONAL)

Everything else

What does the guidance cover?

The draft guidance [pdf] sets out what information clinics should provide to patients and when this should be provided.

In order to comply with consumer law, clinics must not provide misleading information to patients or fail to provide all the relevant 'material' information they need to make informed decisions.

It also explains what clinics should do to make sure their terms and practices are fair under consumer law.

It’s intended to address problems such as:

patients being unable to compare clinics' prices because some clinics present misleadingly low headline prices

some clinics providing misleading information about their success rates
some clinics not informing patients about the limited evidence base for certain add-on treatments or their associated risks
some patients being faced with unexpected additional costs during treatment

What does the CMA want to know?

The CMA want to hear from anyone with knowledge of the fertility sector - including patients - so they can take can our views and expertise into account as they finalise the guidance.

They’ve published a consultation document [pdf] with a series of questions to consider, such as:

asking for views on the information that patients need at various stages to make informed decisions about which clinic to choose and which treatments to buy
inviting further examples of practices, policies and terms used by fertility clinics in their dealings with patients that raise concerns from a consumer law perspective
seeking views on the scope of the guidance and whether there are aspects of the guidance that could be clarified.

Take part in the consultation

Questionnaire

Ths easiest way to take part in the consultation is to fill in this questionnaire and I’ll collate all the answers into one submission.

Please submit your answers by no later than Sunday 3 January 2021

Email

Alternatively, you can email your thoughts to ConsumerLawIVFTeam@cma.gov.uk by no later than 5pm on Tuesday 5 January 2021.

Find out more

For more about the consultation please check out the CMA’s website.