Thérapie Fertility – a leading IVF clinic in Ireland talks affordable care, success rates, and what’s new right now
What to look for in an IVF clinic in Ireland, right now
If you’re looking to go abroad for fertility treatment, you might be considering an IVF clinic in Ireland when building out your list of options. And if not – you might want to after watching this.
From affordable, accessible treatment options, and inclusive fertility care, Ireland is blazing a trail on the European stage.
The 101, with a leading clinic
Watch as we lift the lid on affordable care in Ireland, the success rates to benchmark with the rest of your list, and what’s new in tech and treatment in 2024 – with Dr John Kennedy, the Medical Director at Thérapie Fertility.
We cover;
- IVF success rates in Ireland
- Irish laws and legislation to know
- Improved accessibility of treatment
We also chatted through the latest treatment and tech to ask about at Thérapie Fertility Clinic, including:
- The gold standard of care
- Fertility tech advancements in the lab
- Reciprocal IVF options
- The latest on fertility preservation
And, importantly, we deep dive how to get the ball rolling with treatment in Ireland when coming from the UK, or further afield.
Keen to get started?
From their inclusive packages with zero hidden costs to compassionate, expert care that puts you first – you’ll be supported every step of the way at Thérapie Fertility Clinic.
Book a free first consultation here or give them a call on +35 3 01 223 8933
Transcript
Eloise Edington
Hello, welcome. Today I have the pleasure of speaking to Dr. John Kennedy, the Medical Director at Therapy Fertility Clinic in Ireland.
I met him in person when I visited their beautiful clinic just before Christmas last year to see the latest technology and developments in fertility care, especially with Therapie Fertility.
Dr. John should be joining us any second now. Hello, Dr. John!
Dr. John Kennedy
Hello, how are you?
Eloise Edington
I’m very well, thank you. How are you?
Dr. John Kennedy
I’m great. Thanks for doing this—it’s fantastic.
Eloise Edington
Absolutely. Could you introduce yourself, tell us a bit about your role at Therapie Fertility, and give some background on the clinic? Then we’ll talk about fertility care and treatment in Ireland.
Dr. John Kennedy
Hello, everybody. My name is Dr. John Kennedy. I’m the Medical Director of Therapie Fertility. We’re an IVF and fertility clinic located in Dublin, Ireland, with satellite clinics in Dundalk, Galway, and Limerick, and hopefully more to follow.
We opened in 2020, did our first cases in 2021, and celebrated our second birthday a while back. We started with the aim—and we’re going to talk a lot about this—of making fertility treatment accessible, affordable, transparent, and process-driven.
So far, I’d like to think we’ve succeeded. Last year, we did just over 1,200 egg collections, which is a huge number for a new IVF clinic, and we’ve managed to maintain success rates by structuring processes and modernising things.
Eloise Edington
It’s fascinating. I visited your clinic in Dublin and had a great experience looking around, meeting the lovely team, and seeing the beautiful premises. I’d love to hear how you’re making care accessible and affordable while achieving great success rates.
Many patients get confused by add-ons and different treatment methods, so it would be great to understand more about the IVF landscape in Ireland—laws, costs, processes—and how Therapie Fertility is leading the way in innovative care in 2024.
Dr. John Kennedy
One of our parliament members recently described the fertility landscape in Ireland as a “wild west,” but that’s really not true. In practical terms, we don’t have an oversight authority like the HFEA in the UK. We are supposed to get one, possibly this year or next; it’s been in the works for a while. But honestly, I don’t think it will change most clinic processes much. We’re still covered by EU legislation for lab monitoring and checks. We’re licensed, accredited, and undergo inspections to ensure our processes are correct. We don’t have a national governing authority that dictates who can do IVF, age limits, BMI restrictions, or embryo limits.
In this regard, clinics have been self-regulating, and we all conform to international norms. So, I don’t think introducing legislation will fundamentally change practices. I am cautious about the idea of telling people they can’t pursue fertility treatment because of age, except when they’re too young. Once you’re of medical consent age, it’s not our job to tell people they can’t undergo treatment.
Our job is to be transparent about the challenges associated with age, for instance, and how that might affect success rates. We inform patients of their chances and ensure they understand what that means practically. If I tell someone they have a 50% chance, they should know what that means—whether it’s pregnancy, miscarriage, or live birth.
Similarly, if it’s a 1% chance, they need to understand that realistically, that means success only once in a hundred tries. That’s a tough conversation, but it’s essential.
Eloise Edington
That’s an insightful approach. I appreciate your summary. If anyone has questions for Dr. John as we speak, please put them in the comments.
Therapie Fertility opened in 2021, and now, three years on, you’re leading in 2024. What does your clinic offer as standard and as gold?
Dr. John Kennedy
One of our starting principles was the idea that the less you do, the better you can be at it. The tighter your focus, the better you deliver within that focus. So, we decided exactly what we would and wouldn’t do.
Our services include intrauterine insemination (IUI), IVF, fertility preservation with egg and sperm freezing, surgical sperm retrievals, reciprocal IVF, and treatment with donor sperm. But we’re very deliberate about what we don’t offer: egg donation, surrogacy, and genetic screening of embryos.
These services are crucial for certain patients, and we understand that. If they need them, we direct them to clinics that specialise in those areas, where they’ll receive high-level care.
But if we tried to include them, it would complicate our core offerings and potentially impact the quality of what we do. So, we decided to focus exclusively on what we do best.
As for add-ons, the HFEA has a traffic light system for them, and so far, none have a green light. We don’t offer optional add-ons; rather, everything we believe in is standard.
Blastocyst culture (growing embryos to five days rather than three) and time-lapse imaging (incubators that take photos of the embryo every 10-15 minutes to build a video) are examples. The evidence for benefit isn’t conclusive yet, but it theoretically should be.
Every patient has access to these; they’re part of our standard, not something you pay extra for. This approach creates a more efficient process, serves embryos better, and provides valuable information.
Eloise Edington
That’s great. When patients approach us with add-on questions, we’re transparent and explain our decisions. Patients often come in with a lot of questions and sometimes suggestions based on things they’ve read or heard. Instead of dismissing these, we discuss our reasons for not offering certain things. Over 90% of the time, patients are fine with that once we explain it thoroughly.
It’s so refreshing to hear that. When I visited, I noticed your lab’s green credentials and advanced technology. Can you share more about the advancements and developments you’ve introduced recently?
Dr. John Kennedy
Sure. IVF advancements in the last decade have really focused on time-lapse incubation and embryo management. We’re also much better at freezing and thawing eggs, sperm, and embryos. These are significant developments.
Interestingly, I was asked recently about the biggest challenges facing fertility clinics going forward, and my answer is: innovation. New products and technologies often come into the lab without enough due diligence.
Our lab was built to do a set of things very well, and we can scale up and down within that scope. If we introduced additional treatments, it could disrupt our success rates.
For instance, using embryo glue, which might benefit certain patients, introduces a new process, meaning our workflow changes. When it comes to IVF, even small process changes matter. I’m very focused on efficiencies, optimisation, and process flow, as is our lab manager, Carol, so we’re careful about bringing anything into the lab that hasn’t been proven absolutely necessary.
Eloise Edington
Yes, I remember your lab’s air filtration system.
Dr. John Kennedy
Yes, our lab has HEPA and carbon filters and is set up to maintain a Grade C lab standard. That includes protocols around volatile organic compounds—no perfumes, strict gowning up.
We were able to build this lab to a high spec right from the start, thanks to its location in a clean, residential area of South County Dublin.
Eloise Edington
We have quite a few questions coming in, so I’d encourage people to DM Therapy Fertility after this to speak with Dr. John directly.
But I have to ask: what would you say to people considering coming over from England to Ireland for treatment?
Dr. John Kennedy
We’re certainly seeing an increase in patients coming from the UK and Northern Ireland. O
ne of the advantages is that we have a satellite in Dundalk where you can get scans and blood work done. You’d only need to come to Dublin for the egg retrieval and embryo transfer. We accept test results from the UK, with just a few necessary screenings that need to be done here.
An interesting point is BMI restrictions. Ireland now has public funding for fertility treatment, but it comes with strict BMI restrictions, like in the UK. Many private clinics in the UK are NHS-adjacent, meaning they might follow similar restrictions, but we can take a more individualised approach.
That happened, but the outcome of that is that these patients can’t have care. And a lot of these patients don’t have time. And also, look, they’ve struggled with their weight their whole life. It’s not like you’ve opened their eyes, you’ve given them something revelatory by saying, “You know what, your BMI is an issue.” They know that. They’ve known that forever, that’s not news to them. They struggle with this forever, and a lot of them are of an age where the “seesaw effect” is very real—they’re losing eggs, they’re losing opportunity, they’re losing time faster than they can shake weight.
And anybody who’s tried to lose weight knows that there’s only one thing that is true: there is no such thing as a rate of weight loss that is too slow, but there are many times when a rate of weight loss is too fast and just rebounds back up.
So telling somebody, weaponising their weight against them, and saying, “Well, your BMI is 33 so you need to lose 10 kilos,” how is that going to help them? What’s the solution there? And then offering nothing in terms of support.
By all means, take them out of that room and show them into the other room which has the dietitian, the meal planner, the endocrinologist. But there’s none of that; it’s just “go away and lose weight and come back to me.”
So we don’t have BMI limits here. As you can hear from my conversation, there are philosophical reasons for that. We do have very frank and honest conversations about the challenges that high BMI can bring to the table in terms of access to the ovaries, response to sedation, response to medications, impact on success rates.
Although I don’t think that’s as big an issue as everybody says—I think that gets overstated. We have some data to back this up. So, we don’t have BMI limits, and I think that’s been a driver for some people coming over.
But what I really like to see is, we’ve been around long enough that there are enough people out there. Babies feed fertility clinics. If you have a baby, you tell people. Maybe not everyone, but most people share that story. If 50 people in a row come in and say, “I know somebody who knows somebody who came here,” it’s word of mouth.
I do think being savvy and using social media is very relevant, but I can’t speak strongly enough to the value of a good personal experience with the doctor, with the nurses. That’s what makes me happy because we’ve only been around two years, and we’re doing well. That reputation within the field, I’d like to think, will grow and grow well.
Eloise Edington
How do you maintain such high success rates and keep costs affordable?
Dr. John Kennedy
The success rates, I think, ultimately come down to simple, process-driven approaches, looking at the evidence, doing simple things well.
I’d love to say success rates are due to how brilliant Dr. McGat and I are, but it’s also not true. It’s the lab; it’s the careful management of eggs, sperm, and embryos. Efficiency of managing the doctor’s time helps keep costs down, as doctors are expensive.
Previously, I’d spend an hour with a patient, organise tests, then spend another half an hour talking to that patient before starting their cycle. That’s 90 minutes. Now, our initial consultation is with a nurse who’s fully capable of providing information on IVF, breaking down what we do. They organise testing based on an algorithm or case-by-case basis, then the patient sees me or Dr. McGat. The consult is half an hour, which means I can deliver more cycles.
In the past, a standard IVF doctor would have looked after about 250-300 cycles a year. We’re doing 600, but we’re not compromising care.
The success rates speak for themselves. We’re being efficient with resources. People often say, “I don’t want to be treated like a number,” but I think it’s good to be on a conveyor belt if that conveyor belt leads to babies.
Doing that stuff at the front end, working out the right process, and then revisiting on a case-by-case basis as you go through, helps us be efficient and keep it affordable. We pass that on to patients.
Eloise Edington
And reciprocal IVF—you do a lot of that at the clinic. What is it?
Dr. John Kennedy
Reciprocal IVF is for same-sex couples where one person undergoes treatment, their eggs are retrieved, and donor sperm is used to make embryos. Those embryos are then transferred to the other partner.
It’s a lovely, elegant thing that a lot of same-sex couples want to do. They come in with a very clear idea of who wants to carry, but sometimes things change.
Eloise Edington
Do you find couples sometimes change who will carry based on tests?
Dr. John Kennedy
Very much. We recommend testing for both parties to make the best decision. For example, if one is 38 and the other is 34, it might seem obvious to go with the younger one’s eggs.
But if the older partner wants to use their genetic material, it might be best to focus on them first.
Eloise Edington
We’ve had a lot of people ask about success rates and options for IVF over 40.
Dr. John Kennedy
For someone over 40, success rates will naturally be lower. You look at their history of infertility or subfertility, ovarian reserve, and other factors.
The consultation is to give them information—brutally honest facts about pregnancy loss rates and chances of success. Fertility journeys should end in one of two ways: achieving your family or knowing you’ve done everything you’re comfortable with.
But I’m not going to push someone through for the sake of it.
Eloise Edington
And for those interested in treatment with you from the UK or further away, how can they start?
Dr. John Kennedy
Start with an online consult; you don’t need to come over just for that. We can arrange local tests, then when you come here, you can get a more comprehensive assessment, and we can organise everything for a later visit. It can be done very efficiently.
Eloise Edington
Thank you so much for speaking with us, Dr. John. For anyone interested, please reach out to Therapy Fertility.
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