Patients 'given other women's embryos'

Paul Fielding worked at two clinics in Basingstoke

An embryologist may have transferred other women's embryos into his patients, a court has heard.

Paul Fielding is accused of leaving the patients' own embryos in frozen storage while he worked at the Hampshire Clinic in Basingstoke.

Audits at the clinic uncovered concerns that Mr Fielding was allowing women to have the operations needlessly because he was paid each time the procedure went ahead, enabling him to pay off his debts.

In a statement to Southampton Crown Court, prosecutor Jeremy Gibbons, QC, said: "As a result of the audit it is statistically possible that embryos of other women were transferred into the women named in the indictment".

Mr Fielding, 44, who lived at Station Road, Whitchurch, Hampshire, at the time of the alleged offences, faces three charges of assault causing actual bodily harm and eight of false accounting to obtain money by deception.

He denies all 11 charges that relate to his work between 1997 and 1999 at both the Hampshire Clinic and the NHS-run North Hampshire fertility centre, also in Basingstoke.

Audits at the private Hampshire Clinic, in Basingstoke, uncovered Mr Fielding's alleged fraud in 2000.

The trial continues.