A fertility business who mistakenly lost an Auckland couple’s frozen embryos say they are "gutted" by the incident, describing it as "incredibly frustrating".
Yesterday, Fertility Associates chief medical officer Andrew Murray told 1News the incident involved a patient being treated at the group's Auckland clinic in October 2025.
He said no other patients were affected by the incident, and confirmed with "absolute confidence" that no embryos had been transferred to another person.
Speaking to Breakfast this morning, Murray said the organisation "was gutted" by the incident, and described it as "very frustrating" for all involved.
"We have had incidents in the past where embryos could not be located. But what's different about this case is that in those situations, we were ultimately able to find the reason why, and of course, that was immediately disclosed to those patients and dealt with them privately."
"What is different here is that we just don't know where the embryos are at this point in time, and I realise that's frustrating, it's incredibly frustrating.
"We're gutted about it. Ultimately we're gutted for the couple involved," he said.
Murray said IVF was an "emotionally charged" and "complex" health process involving humans, which meant there was always room for human error.
"Each year our clinic group would perform somewhere between seven to seven-and-a-half thousand egg retrievals and embryo transfers.
"And as I said before, it's a very complex process, it does involve humans, and I don't think it would be wise to ever say an error could never happen again.
"You know, we're an area of health care like any other, where unfortunately things will sometimes go wrong.
"But what we've been able to assess here with absolute certainty, as I say, is these embryos aren't in the wrong patient and they haven't been accidentally discarded."
He declared the systems to be "robust" following an independent review, but said trust built between patients and the organisation "has been shaken here".
"Understandably, you know, our relationship with our patients is built on trust. They trust us to look after their precious embryos, and that trust has been shaken here.
"And the reason, we've chosen to front foot this and bring this into the light is to just make it clear that we're an open, honest organisation. Trust is about being honest and that's why we've come forward about it."
Murray explained that embryos were monitored using CCTV surveillance, and stored in liquid nitrogen containers with unique identifiers for the patients in question.
"Whenever we move embryos from one place to the other, we have a combination of both double human witnessing and also electronic ID verification as well," he said.
However, he said "a number of changes have occurred as a result of this incident" and following the independent review.
“We've moved our embryo storage facility in Auckland to a different part in the building, increased CCTV footage surveillance, and we've also added in extra senior leadership oversight."
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