About Postcode to Parenthood

We're a small team of two.

One of us has over a decade of hands-on experience in London's leading fertility clinics. She's lived the full patient journey, the clinical calls, the operational snags, the admin that ultimately shapes the patient experience. From preparation and treatment through to aftercare, across both medical and administrative sides.

The other one? He made the coffees and the website. (Hi!)

That's it. No board of directors, no investors, no advisory panel of people who've never sat in a waiting room.

We kept seeing the same thing: patients crying, frustrated, confused and exhausted. Not because of bad news from a doctor, but because they'd just discovered that the rules about who gets funded, and how much, make no sense.

Move ten miles down the road and your entitlement changes completely. Turn 35 a week before your referral goes through and the door slams shut.

The system isn't broken in some abstract policy way. It's broken in a way that fundamentally affects people's lives, and their chance for parenthood.

We built this site to fix that. Not the policy (we can't), but the information gap.

Right now, understanding what you're entitled to means wading through dozens of PDF documents written in commissioning language that no normal person should have to decode.

We thought: what if someone just laid it all out clearly, in one place, for free?

So that's what we did.

• Your data stays with you. We don't sell personal information to clinics, pharma companies, or anyone else. There's no analytics tracking beyond what we need to keep the site running.
• We show our working. Every data point links back to the source document. If we're unsure about something, we say so. If something is out of date, we flag it.
• Nobody funds us but us. This is a volunteer project built in evenings and weekends because we think it matters. If that ever changes, you'll be the first to know.

We do not have any commercial relationships with fertility providers. Our focus is currently on NHS-funded treatment and supporting patients through that journey.

At the same time, we understand that for many people, getting a second opinion or exploring private fertility options can make a very meaningful difference; whether because of long waiting lists, unsuccessful NHS cycles, access to different treatments, or simply wanting to explore every possible route forward.

As the platform grows, we would like to include private fertility options as part of our features in the future. If and when we do, it will be guided by genuine clinical experience and quality of care. From our own experience, we know that personalised care, understanding, transparency, and feeling truly supported can make a real difference throughout the fertility journey. We will also always be fully transparent about how the site is funded.

For now, however, we remain entirely NHS-focused and self-funded.

Every piece of funding data on this site is sourced directly from official ICB (Integrated Care Board) policy documents. These are the PDFs that each health board publishes outlining their fertility treatment commissioning criteria: age limits, BMI requirements, number of funded cycles, and waiting time expectations.

Our process works like this:

1. Source identification – We locate the current fertility commissioning policy for each ICB, typically published on their website or available through FOI requests.
2. Manual extraction – A human reads the policy document and extracts the structured criteria (age ranges, BMI limits, cycle counts, residency requirements, and other eligibility factors).
3. Data entry and verification – The extracted data is entered into our database and cross-checked against the source document for accuracy.
4. Confidence flagging – Each entry is tagged with a confidence level: confirmed (recently verified against a current policy), inherited (carried over from a predecessor ICB after a merger), under review, or unconfirmed.
5. Ongoing monitoring – We periodically check for policy updates, particularly around the NHS financial year (April) when commissioning decisions are often revised.

We store the original policy PDFs alongside our structured data so we can always trace a data point back to its source. Where policies are ambiguous or contradictory, we flag this rather than guessing.

For a full list of our data sources and references, see our sources page. If any of the terminology is unfamiliar, our glossary explains everything in plain English.

We believe in being upfront about what this site can and can't do. Please keep the following in mind:

• This is not medical advice. Nothing on this site constitutes medical guidance. We present policy information (what your health board says it will fund) but we can't tell you whether you personally qualify. Only your GP and fertility clinic can assess your individual circumstances.
• Data may be outdated. ICB policies can change at any time, and there's often a delay between a policy being updated and us reflecting that change. We show the date of the source document wherever possible so you can judge how current the information is.
• Always verify with your GP. Before making any decisions about fertility treatment based on information you find here, please speak to your GP or fertility clinic. They have access to the most current commissioning criteria and can assess your specific situation.
• Coverage isn't complete. We aim to cover all ICBs in England, but some boards have policies that are difficult to locate or interpret. Where we're uncertain, we say so rather than guessing.
• We're a small team. This is a volunteer-led project. We do our best to keep data current, but we don't have the resources of a large organisation. If you spot something that looks wrong, please let us know.