Our Sources

Our baseline dataset for England comes from the UK Government's published overview of NHS-funded IVF provision:

This publication provides a summary of funded IVF cycles by ICB. We use it as a cross-reference and starting point, but our detailed criteria (age limits, BMI requirements, waiting times, residency rules) come from reading each ICB's full policy document directly.

For each Integrated Care Board in England, we source the full fertility commissioning policy document. These are typically published as PDFs on the ICB's website, often under their clinical policies, individual funding request, or commissioning pages.

We store a copy of each document and extract structured data from it: cycle entitlements, age ranges, BMI limits, waiting time expectations, and other eligibility criteria. Where a policy is ambiguous, we flag the uncertainty rather than guessing.

On each board page, you can view the source document for that ICB's data.

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each have national-level fertility policies rather than the area-by-area variation seen in England.

• Scotland — National policy set by the Scottish Government, applied uniformly across all NHS health boards.
• Wales — Policy published by the Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee (WHSSC), applicable across all Welsh health boards.
• Northern Ireland — Regional fertility service criteria published by Health and Social Care Northern Ireland.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends that women under 43 should be offered 3 full cycles of IVF. This is a recommendation, not a mandate. Individual ICBs decide whether to follow it, and most don't fully.

Each entry in our database is tagged with a confidence level:

• Confirmed — Verified against a policy document dated within the last 3 years.
• Under review — The source document is older or we're aware of potential changes that haven't been confirmed yet.
• Inherited — Policy carried over from a predecessor organisation (e.g. after an ICB merger) and not yet independently verified under the new body.
• Unconfirmed — We haven't yet been able to locate or verify the source document.

We check for policy updates periodically, particularly around the NHS financial year in April when commissioning decisions are often revised.