Single women are being offered fertility treatment by almost a fifth of NHS trusts casting doubt on the Government’s family friendly credentials.Women not in relationships are receiving publicly funded IVF despite official guidance that suggests support should go to couples who have been trying without success to have a baby for several years.

Meanwhile in other parts of the country married couples are being denied help in starting a family, forcing them to spend thousands of pounds on private treatment.

It comes after a Labour nanny state law removed the requirement for fertility doctors to consider a child’s need to have a male role model before going ahead with IVF.

Critics say the Government, which David Cameron promised would be “the most family friendly we’ve ever had in this country”, should tackle the postcode lottery of IVF provision and ensure that the needs of children are put first.

Frank Field, the Labour MP who carried out a high-profile review into poverty and life chances last year, said: “It’s clearly wrong that while couples in stable relationships can’t get IVF and in other areas, single women can.

“It’s really important that Government ministers speak up for children who are the ones left out of this. It needs someone in a position of authority to reflect what most taxpayers think.”

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester who once chaired the ethics committee of Britain’s fertility watchdog, said: “The irony is that at the very time research is showing the need for both parents, we are writing fathers out of the legislation.

“It’s one thing for a mother to find herself a single parent because of tragic circumstances. It’s quite another to plan for a situation where the child comes into the world without having a father or any possibility of having a father.”

Most local health authorities stipulate that couples must have been in a relationship for two or three years to qualify for IVF treatment.

That requirement is based on guidance issued in 2004 by the National Institute for Curbing Expenditure (Nice), the NHS rationing body,.

It states: “Couples in which the woman is aged 23–39 years at the time of treatment and who have an identified cause for their fertility problems … or who have infertility of at least three years’ duration, should be offered up to three stimulated cycles of in vitro fertilisation treatment.”

The document does note that the guidelines do not address social criteria “for example, whether it is single women or same-sex couples who are seeking treatment”.

However the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 removed the reference to “the need for a father” when considering the welfare of the child when considering fertility treatment, replacing it with “the need for supportive parenting”.

Gareth Johnson MP, who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Infertility, said that trusts offering the service to single women were going against one of the guiding principles of IVF, “that you are treating an infertile couple, not an infertile individual”.

Mr Johnson, the Conservative MP for Dartford, said: “Speaking in a personal capacity, if you are going for IVF, you are trying to create a baby, so there should be some evidence of a stable background, which you would expect to be a couple.”

Earlier this year he led an APPG report that found startling differences between what health authorities offered in terms of IVF.

It found three-quarters of Primary Care Trusts were failing to offer three cycles of IVF, as stipulated by Nice. Each cycle comprises a woman’s ovaries being stimulated to produce eggs, which are then fertilised in vitro and implanted in the womb. Spare eggs should be frozen for use if the first attempt fails.

The report found five trusts offered no IVF at all – Warrington, West Sussex, Stockport, North Staffordshire and North Yorkshire and York. Since then, NHS West Sussex has decided to start funding IVF again.

Many trusts have also started putting in place further barriers to IVF funding – for example demanding obese women lose weight – in part to limit demand as health budgets tighten.

Against a background of increasingly scarce provision, as the NHS tries to save £20billion by 2015, Mr Johnson said the decision to offer IVF to single women was misplaced.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Single-women-being-offered-IVF-on-the-NHS

According to research, taking a holiday– particularly a sunny one – can lower your IQ.A Health warning- two weeks’ holiday could reduce your IQ by as much as 20 points, but, fortunately, the effect is only temporary.

Holidays, it seems – particularly to sweltering destinations – can impair mental functioning.

The problems begin when you book your holiday online, particularly if this entails a lengthy email exchange. According to a 2005 study by psychologist Glenn Wilson, visiting professor at Gresham College, London, email “bombardment” can reduce IQ by up to 10 points – more than double the effect of smoking a considerable amount of cannabis.

Prof Wilson has labelled the condition “infomania”. Concentration is impaired as sufferers’ minds remain fixed in an almost permanent state of readiness to react to potential incoming messages, as opposed to focusing on tasks in hand.

Even on a good day, the human brain finds it hard to cope with juggling multiple tasks simultaneously, so the email overload further reduces its effectiveness.

Then you actually have to get to your holiday resort.

The stress of modern travel – worries over airport strikes, volcanic ash or whether you’re in the right queue for priority boarding – can increase levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.

This risks damaging cells in part of the brain called the hippocampus, which in turn adversely affects short-term memory and concentration.

Add a restorative drink while airborne and, depending on the beverage, you could drop another 10 to 20 IQ points, according to Alcohol Concern. And you haven’t even checked into your hotel yet.

It is at this point that phrenic Armageddon really kicks in. Research by Professor Siegfried Lehrl of the University of Erlangen in Germany, a specialist in mental performance, suggests that sunbathing and relaxation cause one’s frontal lobes literally to shrivel.

Prof Lehrl says that inactivity reduces oxygen to the brain, which causes the dendrites and axons (parts of the nerve cells involved in sending electrical impulses) to degrade. Add dehydration caused by excess heat, alcohol, or both, and brain cell volume may decrease by up to 15 per cent.

“Fourteen days of complete rest can be enough to bring your IQ down by 20 points – more than the difference between a bright and an average student,” says Prof Lehrl. “Vocabulary shrinks, and we even detect personality changes.”

For men, this loss of intelligence may well be exacerbated by the vision of the opposite sex in bikinis. A 2008 study for The Journal of Consumer Research concluded that merely looking at women in beach garb “instigates generalised impatience in intertemporal choice”.

In layman’s terms, men’s judgment and self-critical faculties are compromised, and, in worst-case scenarios, they will propose to (or proposition) the first girl who winks at them.

At this point, you might be tempted to down a cold beer or a Gin and Tonic at the poolside bar. Don’t!

Researchers at Bristol University discovered that drinking anything overly cold reduces brain power by as much as 10 IQ points, as energy and blood are diverted from the brain to the stomach, to balance the drop in temperature.

So how can you negate the nightmare effects of your dream vacation?

According to Prof Lehrl, you should exercise your brain on holiday for at least 10 minutes a day by playing an intellectually stimulating game (chess or Scrabble, for instance), mitigate inactivity with regular long walks, rehydrate constantly – and chew lots of gum.

Gum? “The part of the brainstem that keeps us alert is constantly stimulated by chewing, as a result of which the attention level rises, as does the flow of blood to the brain.”

If you lack the willpower to follow the professor’s advice, the good news is that, unless you did propose to the first girl who winked at you (and she accepted), the consequences of a vacation are temporary. Four days later, your IQ usually returns to normal.

So next time you see raucous holidaymakers necking beers and mooning passers-by, try not to be too judgmental: they are probably email-overloaded nuclear safety engineers who have neglected to chew gum. Hopefully, they will leave a sensible interval between returning to work and installing their reactor’s control rods.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Sun-sea-and-shrinking-brain-power

Hospitals in England have been fined for keeping patients in mixed sex accommodation under a new push to eradicate the problem.There were 2,660 breaches in April – half the number from the previous month, the Department of Health said.

Hospitals are fined £250 for each day a patient is kept in mixed sex wards.

It means at least £665,000 of fines have been levied, although the sum could be higher as the data does not detail how long a breach has been for.

The Coalition government’s drive on mixed sex accommodation follows failed attempts by the Labour administration to tackle the issue.

Labour ministers struggled, partly because large chunks of the NHS estate date back decades and proved hard to convert.

Extra money has now been ploughed in to the system to help build more single rooms to rectify this.

April marked the first month the new fining system was applied. Previously, the levels of fines varied considerably depending on the treatment and were inconsistently levied.

Over the past few months, the government has been publishing breach figures ahead of the start of the new fining system. These show the problem has been improving.

In December there were more than 11,000 breaches. By March that had fallen to under 5,500. However that has to be seen in the context of the one million plus patients seen each month.

Single sex accommodation means patients sharing sleeping, bathroom and toilet facilities only with people of the same sex.

The rules do allow wards to be segregated into distinct bays as long as they have separate facilities.

They apply to all trusts from acute hospitals to mental health units. Only intensive care and A&E are excused.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said the downward trend was pleasing, but there were “still too many breaches”.

He added all the fines would be reinvested back into patient care.

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mixed sex wards lead to hospital fines

The researchers say that movements associated with good dancing may be indicative of good health and reproductive potential.  Their findings are published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
“When you go out to clubs people have an intuitive understanding of what makes a good and bad dancer,” said co-author Dr Nick Neave, an evolutionary psychologist at Northumbria University, UK.

“What we’ve done for the very first time is put those things together with a biometric analysis so we can actually calculate very precisely the kinds of movements people focus on and associate them with women’s ratings of male dancers.”

Dr Neave asked young men who were not professional dancers, to dance in a laboratory to a very basic drum rhythm and their movements with 12 cameras.

These movements were then converted into a computer-generated cartoon – an avatar – which women rated on a scale of one to seven. He was surprised by the results.

“We thought that people’s arms and legs would be really important. The kind of expressive gestures the hands [make], for example. But in fact this was not the case,” he said.

We found that (women paid more attention to) the core body region: the torso, the neck, the head”

“We found that (women paid more attention to) the core body region: the torso, the neck, the head. It was not just the speed of the movements, it was also the variability of the movement. So someone who is twisting, bending, moving, nodding.”

Movements that went down terribly were twitchy and repetitive – so called “Dad dancing”.

Dr Neave’s aim was to establish whether young men exhibited the same courtship movement rituals in night clubs as animals do in the wild. In the case of animals, these movements give information about their health, age, their reproductive potential and their hormone status.

“People go to night clubs to show off and attract the opposite sex so I think it’s a valid way of doing this,” Dr Neave explained.

“In animals, the male has to be in good physical quality to carry out these movements. We think the same is happening in humans and certainly the guys that can put these movements together are going to be young and fit and healthy.”

Dr Neave also took blood samples from the volunteers. Early indications from biochemical tests suggest that the men who were better dancers were also more healthy.

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/good dancing sign of a healthy male

Tens of thousands of hospital patients were forced to be in mixed sex wards last year despite Labour promises that men and women would be separated, new figures suggest.
The announcement came as the new coalition government revealed that men and women will no longer have to share facilities in English hospitals.

More than eight thousand breaches of Labour’s pledge to “virtually eliminate” mixed wards were reported in just half of England’s Strategic Health Authorities in the first quarter of this year, new figures show.

If the same level existed across the rest of the country it would mean there were more than 16,000 breaches in three months, equating to 64,000 cases a year.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, announced yesterday that the “indignity” of men and women sharing accommodation would be abolished, almost 15 years after Tony Blair made the same promise.

But men and women may still have to share wards, provided the hospital ensures that male and female patients sleep in separate areas and have their own washing facilities.

Labour committed in two manifestos to provide separate accommodation for men and women, except where it was in the interests of the patient not to do so.

They later decided to divide wards into same-sex “bays”, meaning same-sex accommodation could include men and women sleeping in separate partitions of the same ward.

But the new figures reveal that one in ten patients is still admitted to a mixed ward, while a third have to share bathrooms with members of the opposite sex.

The information suggests data is not being recorded consistently across the country and NHS organisations are continuing to place patients in mixed sex accommodation for “operational reasons”, the government claimed.

Under new steps announced by Mr Lansley, NHS organisations can be held accountable for failing to guarantee same-sex accommodation where there is no clinical justification.

From next January, any breaches of the guarantee will be reported regularly and commissioners will sanction NHS bodies which admit failing to meet the pledge.

For the first time the reports will be made publicly available, meaning patients receiving elective treatment can choose to avoid the worst-performing hospitals.

Mr Lansley told BBC Radio 4′s PM programme: “It should be more than an expectation, it should be a requirement that patients who are admitted should be admitted to single-sex accommodation.

“Patients should be in single-sex accommodation, meaning that all of their period that they are admitted they should be in a bed or a bay which only consists of people of the same sex.

“And they should be able to come and go, for example to all their washing and toilet facilities, without having to pass through a part of the ward or another ward where there might be people of a different sex… so to that extent they would have the kind of privacy and dignity people have a right to expect.”

He added: “Patients should not suffer the indignity of being cared for in mixed sex accommodation. I am determined to put an end to this practice, where it is not clinically justified.

“In the future, NHS organisations will have clear standards, spelling out when they should report a breach. Where NHS organisations fail to meet this standard, we will let the public know they have failed and we will strengthen the fines which may apply.”

Chief Nursing Officer Christine Beasley added: “Protecting the privacy and dignity of patients by eliminating mixed sex accommodation must be a priority for the NHS.

“Driving this change will be the publishing of statistics on mixed sex accommodation breaches by NHS trusts. This measure will allow patients to make better informed decisions about their care.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Thousands-of-patients-still-forced-to-stay-in-mixed-sex-wards

The rising rate of blunders in IVF treatment ‘may be systemic’, says leading patient safety expert

The number of reported mistakes a t the 138 fertility clinics in England and Wales nearly doubled in the year to April 2009, rising to 334 from 182 the previous year. One leading patient safety expert has now warned that blunders which have occurred as record numbers of women seek treatment, may be “systemic”.

The increase comes as one clinic, IVF Wales, is at the centre of a fresh scandal after losing the last two remaining embryos it had frozen for one of its patients. It is the second time in less than 12 months that a mix up at the centre, based at University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, has left patients devastated.

The Cardiff-based couple has had their eight-year quest to have a baby put on hold as a result of the blunder, which followed an initial, unsuccessful course of IVF. The pair, identified only as Clare and Gareth, are suing Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, which last year paid out a five-figure sum in compensation for negligence after another mix up.

Guy Forster, a solicitor at the law firm Irwin Mitchell who is representing the couple, said the incident raised questions about the Government’s IVF watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

“This raises concerns about the HFEA’s ability to regulate the IVF industry properly. I think it should be doing a lot more to follow up when an incident occurs, especially at a clinic with a poor track record,” he said, adding: “These problems appear to be on the rise.”

An official review last year found that the HFEA was failing to punish badly run fertility clinics by not using the “full range of sanctions” at its disposal. Professor Brian Toft, a patient safety expert at Coventry University, said: “If the HFEA fails to clamp down when something has gone wrong then things will continue to go wrong.”

He said the rise in reported incidents, uncovered by BBC Radio 5 Live, implied clinics were not learning from their mistakes, adding: “I have been told there are not enough qualified staff doing the work. HFEA do not make any recommendations for staffing levels per number of patients. If you have a lot of patients and not enough staff, this could account for an increase in errors. This problem may well be systemic.”

Professor Sammy Lee, an IVF expert, said the watchdog must ensure clinics comply with regulations. “They need to obtain staff that have experience of enforcement and are able to make sure that regulations are put into place,” he said.

An HFEA spokesman played down the increase in blunders, which he said was partly due to new rules requiring clinics to include incidents when patients suffered from ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS). “The number of reported incidents has increased as the sector has responded positively to the opportunity to share lessons learned from incidents which have been reviewed and investigated,” the HFEA added in a statement.

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/errors-at-ivf-fertility-clinics-double-in-just-one-year