A shake up of fertility treatment across the East Midlands is being proposed to bring the different health boards into alignment. 

The proposal is to offer just one round of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), impose limitations on people who are overweight and smoke and not offer treatment to those who already have living children or who have had sterilisation treatment. 

Across the five integrated care boards in the East Midlands region there is disparity about what people struggling to conceive are offered. A consultation has begun about the new policy and will run until early January. The individual care boards will then decide whether to adopt the new policy. 

Discussing the issue at the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (LLR) health scrutiny committee meeting today (Nov 27) the medical director for the LLR integrated care board (ICB), Nilesh Sanganee, told committee members the proposals would not make much of an impact in the area as the proposed policy would be close to what is already being offered. 

In the four years to 2023, the LLR ICB has spent just under £2m on IVF treatments (where an egg is removed from the woman and fertilised in a lab before being returned to the womb) and a further half a million pounds on artificial insemination, donor sperm insemination and intrauterine insemination (IUI) – a treatment that involves placing sperm inside a woman's uterus close to the fallopian tubes in order to increase the chances of conceiving. 

In total across the five ICBs just over £9 million was spent between 2019 and 2023. 

The report before the committee said the ICBs in the region could not afford to spend any more than they currently do on fertility treatment. 

Nilesh Sanganee said the new policy had been put together by a specialist public health team. 

He said: "There are absolutely factors that affect the effectiveness of fertility treatments. So they are not just exclusion criteria. 

"They are trying to ensure that when we are funding fertility treatment that we are optimising the success of treatment." 

When asked by Leicester city councillor Karen Pickering (LAB) why the region was not proposing to offer three rounds of IVF as per the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) guidance in line with some other parts of the country, he said: "Nice guidance is just that, it is guidance, so integrated care systems have the ability to interpret that guidance as they see fit for the population, but its also in the context of all the resources that we're trying to provide. 

"These things don't operate in silo. We have to consider our total resource and how we use that most effectively. 

"This is why engagement is really important. The public get to advise us on how we should be spending healthcare resource across the system." 

The LLR ICB is currently £80m over budget this financial year, with the deficit expected to rise. 

In Glossop and Bassetlaw in Derbyshire, the policy currently is that couples can have three rounds of IVF and overweight people and smokers can also have treatment. 

The report said that in the UK one in seven couples are likely to have trouble conceiving.