A woman gave birth to a baby that was not hers, after Monash IVF mistakenly transferred a different patient's embryo. The incident, which it says was due to "human error", occurred at its Brisbane clinic. Monash IVF has apologised and says it will conduct an independent investigation into the incident.
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00:00That really awful mix-up occurred here at the Monash IVF clinic in Brisbane.
00:08Now Monash IVF is blaming human error for the swapping of the wrong thawed embryo to the wrong birth parents.
00:16Now they say they were alerted to this incident back in February when the birth parents requested to have the remainder of their embryos transferred to another clinic.
00:26When Monash IVF went to fulfil that, they found that there was an additional embryo.
00:32Then an investigation was launched and this error was uncovered.
00:36Now Monash IVF has apologised for this incident.
00:40They say they're devastated by what's happened and will assist the parents, both sets of parents, through what is a really awful situation.
00:48Now they say that this is a process that they're now scrutinising but are confident that it is an isolated incident.
00:56Now experts that the ABC has spoken to say that these issues are extremely rare, although they're not unheard of overseas.
01:06Now late last year the New York Times reported on two sets of parents that gave birth to the wrong biological children.
01:13That was due to an embryo swap and they raised those children for some months before having to make the extremely difficult decision to transfer the children back to the right biological parents.
01:25And errors have also occurred in IVF here in Australia.
01:28We've seen incidences where the wrong sperm donor was used for the wrong parents and that raised a lot of concerns about the need for genetic testing and things like that.
01:39Now Monash IVF has also faced its own scrutiny.
01:43Late last year it settled a $56 million class action lawsuit due to the fact that it was alleged to have used inaccurate genetic testing and also that it destroyed viable embryos.
01:56Now although Monash IVF settled in that case they were not required to admit fault.
02:01Although this will be causing a lot of distress to a lot of people that are going through the IVF process, experts are at pains to say that these incidences, these errors are extremely rare.
02:11So they are doing all these harm to the MIC of their special education.
02:12So they are doing all this.
02:13They are doing all this.
02:14One of the things that I've been trying to do is say I've been trying to do just a lot of
02:15that is to say.
02:16One of the things that they are in the right place that we've been trying to do, is a lot of
02:17this is becoming extremely rare.
02:18And I think the medical system is a lot of this.
02:19One of the things that we've been taking and doing is making sure that it's really challenging
02:20to know that these some of the things that have been very civilized.
02:22That is, and the numbers of caution that we can only say that these issues are extremely rare.
02:23And if they can't do it and I've been able to do it because I can do it without further symmetry right
02:37and the numbers.