NEW technology developed at a Liverpool hospital will significantly reduce the potential for IVF baby mix-ups, according to an expert.

Dr Stephen Troup, scientific director at the Hewitt Centre for Reproductive Medicine at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, has helped create a barcode system that he believes will prevent repeats of an IVF clinic blunder in 2002, where a white couple from Leeds gave birth to black twins.

The system, named Matcher, confirms, records, and provides photographic proof of all procedures carried out throughout every IVF cycle.

The finished product has recently been made available commercially after the Hewitt Centre became the first clinic to offer the service.

Dr Troup said: “An independent inquiry followed as a result of the Leeds case, which was carried out by Professor Brian Toft who concluded that the events were caused through a mixture of inadvertent human error and systems failure.

“The Toft Report suggested that every procedure where a mix-up could occur should be witnessed, which was something the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority then built into their Code of Practice.

“So before the Matcher system, every such procedure had to be witnessed by a second scientist.

“The introduction of the Matcher, however, means that IVF centres who acquire it will no longer have to have a second scientist repeatedly double checking all the patient details”.

The system works by providing a unique barcode which is specific to each patient’s treatment. This barcode is then used to label all the tubes and dishes involved in the treatment and when scanned by the Matcher provides key identifying information about the patients.

The system also produces an ID card containing photographs of the patients which they carry with them for the entire treatment.

Karen Schnauffer, Lead Clinical Embryologist at the Hewitt Centre, has been heavily involved in the project for the past five years after the clinic was approached by technology company IMT.

She said: “It has been extremely exciting to have been involved in the development of this technology within our field where, obviously, any mistake can be devastating.

“The beauty of this machine is that it should never get it wrong. The use of electronic witnessing is also much less distracting for embryologists.”

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