International MAR Registries and the EuMAR vision

Part 1 – Building MAR registries: how Africa, Latin America and Europe are learning from each other

Behind every fertility statistic quoted in a scientific paper or a government report sits a registry, and building one that actually works is far harder than it looks. This is the first of two recordings drawn from “International ART Registries and the EuMAR vision,” a new EuMAR podcast episode in which three of the people who have spent decades building these systems, Prof. Fernando Zegers-Hochschild (Latin America – RedLARA), Prof. Silke Dyer (Africa – ANARA) and Prof. Diane De Neubourg (Europe – EIM/EuMAR), sit down together with podcast host Zoya Ali, to compare notes. From fax machines and hand-filled forms in 1989 to today’s cycle-by-cycle data systems, the conversation traces how Latin America and Africa built their registries from scratch, why Europe is now making the transition from aggregated data to EuMAR, and what it takes to get hundreds of clinics to contribute their data. In this episode, guests discuss the pillars of international MAR registries: from accreditation of clinics and data quality to educational outreach, glossaries, and training, and the human effort behind all of it.