Olga van den Akker and helen allan with colleagues at De Montfort (Lorraine Culley) and Dundee (Andrew Symon) and Flinders University in Austraila (Sheryl de Lacey) have won a Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology developmental grant award to run a workshop to develop a collaborative team to investigate the implications of IVF/ICSI conception for couples’ lives in early parenthood.
This topic is under-explored in the literature internationally. Existing research has identified potential health need but this is ignored by policy makers although acknowledged by service users in the UK. We plan to address this gap in research with our focus on transition to early parenthood for infertile couples, on fatherhood as well as motherhood and on our use of mixed methods as an interdisciplinary team which includes a strong service user perspective. We believe this work has relevance both nationally and internationally.