How to prevent embryo mixups in IVF

  The biggest fear that IVF patients have is that the lab may mix up their embryos with some other patient's.  If the embryos get mixed up , then their embryos may go to someone else ; and they will receive someone else’s. This is a valid concern, and embryo mixups have been well documented, even in  the best of IVF labs. This is an IVF clinic’s major nightmare as well, and because they are aware of this possibility, good clinics develop lots of safety checks , safeguards and processes , to prevent this from happening.Since every patient’s embryos look like every other patient’s embryos , it’s very important that each dish is prominently identified with the name of the patient, so that the embryologist knows exactly who's embryos he is looking . This is why UK clinics use the system of witnessing, where two independent embryologist cross check and verify the name on each dish , every time it is handled.This is also the reason why companies have come up with clever systems to allow for the automatic identification of the labels on the dishes, using RFID, to prevent errors which may occur as a result of mixups because of human error. This is also why most good clinics have a rule that only one procedure can be carried out at one time , so that one embryologist is handling only patient’s eggs or sperm or embryos at one time.However , there are certain high-risk settings when the probability of a mixup becomes extremely high. This is especially true whe...
Source: The Patient's Doctor - Category: Obstetricians and Gynecologists Source Type: blogs