You enter a Pinterest-worthy room with Norwegian-inspired hues and wood-panelled walls. Pretty curvy armchairs decorate the space. Once past the sumptuous reception lounge, you arrive at the cloakroom. Sorry, your changing room, where you put on a cozy dressing gown. All that remains is to make yourself comfortable and wait for someone to call you. Inhale. Exhale.
No, we don’t come to the Pollin clinic to treat ourselves to a massage or a facial treatment, but to consult specialists in medically assisted procreation (MAP). However, it really feels like a spa when you arrive at this brand new fertility clinic. from Toronto. But here, we instead take blood samples and endovaginal ultrasounds, in addition to the plethora of treatments that the PMA process requires. Dr. Kim Garbedian, medical director of the clinic, says, “I always tell my patients that I can’t change the fact that they have to go through this, but I can definitely make the experience better.” pleasant.”
A scene light years away from a certain hospital room in Manchester, England, where, at midnight on November 12, 1977, an embryo was transferred into the uterus of a woman who would give birth to Louise Brown, the world’s first baby born from in vitro fertilization (IVF). Nearly 47 years later, state-of-the-art clinics like Pollin and Twig Fertility in Toronto and the Alberta Reproductive Center (ARC) in Edmonton, remain the exception in a world where many patients say they feel like numbers. Given the number of people who can benefit from treatments like IVF—from LGBTQIA2S+ couples to single people to Canadians suffering from infertility (16% of the country’s population)—there is every reason to rethink the layout of these places to give them a more human and personalized dimension.
