A Clinic of Its Own : Dr. Mark Surrey, a Beverly Hills specialist, got calls about Ventura County infertility patients. He finally chose to open a local center.

Four years ago, Dr. Mark Surrey, an infertility specialist in Beverly Hills, said he began receiving calls from gynecologists in Ventura County. Many of those physicians were treating infertility patients in their general practices. The easier cases--ones that either required simple surgery, artificial insemination or fertility drugs that did not require daily monitoring--were no problem.

But the calls, Surrey said, were about more complicated cases: A woman’s Fallopian tubes were irreversibly scarred; a woman’s body had developed antibodies to her husband’s sperm; a woman had suffered repeated miscarriages with no identifiable cause; artificial insemination had been bafflingly unsuccessful.

“I was asked by several doctors to come up on a consulting basis, but after a while, it made more sense to have an office here,” Surrey said. “The motivation was to have some infertility services available to people here.”

Not long afterward, Surrey opened up the California Fertility Institute in Ventura. It is now staffed by a full-time nurse practitioner who specializes in reproductive endocrinology and an ultrasound technician specially trained to monitor patients taking fertility drugs such as Perganol. Surrey’s patients, however, still must travel to Century City Hospital for in-vitro fertilization or related procedures.

But the testing service alone, many patients said, has been a big help. “At least,” one woman said, “you have one place to choose from.”

Most infertility experts agree that careful, daily monitoring can be one of the most crucial aspects of any IVF program’s success, and consider it so important to the patient’s health that most will not allow another physician or clinic to do the testing for them.

Dr. David Meldrum, at South Bay Hospital in Redondo Beach, echoed the sentiments of several infertility specialists: “We are very particular about having the testing done here. One patient who had the identical test done at two different sites could have two different test results.” A Ventura County patient undergoing IVF at his hospital, he said, would not be permitted to have fertility monitoring done elsewhere.

Infertility specialists may have tightened procedures more since last year when Patti Frustaci, the woman who conceived the nation’s first sextuplets in 1984, successfully sued a Los Angeles infertility clinic. She could receive as much as $6 million. The lawsuit contended that Frustaci’s physician had failed to properly monitor her condition while she was taking Perganol.

Surrey, who said he travels from his office in Beverly Hills about once a week, estimates that he performs about five IVF or related procedures each month on local patients. Those patients, he said, represent “only a small percentage” of the estimated 1 in 6 county couples who have problems with infertility.

But he does have success stories. More than 10 patients said they had sought help from local gynecologists--sometimes for years--before conceiving with Surrey’s help. Although several local gynecologists advertise that they treat infertility in addition to family planning, premenstrual syndrome and menopause, the American Fertility Society in Birmingham, Ala., does not consider them to be specialists.

“A fertility specialist,” according to Joyce Zeitz, the society’s public relations coordinator, “is someone who only does infertility, or a major percentage of their practice, and who has received specialized training in reproductive endocrinology.”

One woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity while her 3-month-old baby cried in the background, expressed the sentiments of several patients who decided to see Surrey: “My husband and I just couldn’t see going to L. A. every day, on top of all the other pressures. Surrey had a good reputation, and we felt we owed it to ourselves to try the easiest way first.”

But other patients say that having only one specialist here isn’t enough. A relationship with a doctor, they say, is intensely personal, especially when it involves procreation. “You’re putting all your life’s hopes and dreams in this one person’s hands,” said a 42-year-old real estate agent, who said she and her husband have never told family members what they are trying to do.

“When you’re talking about something like that,” she said, “I think there should be more than one show in town.”

Surrey has no argument with that position:

“It certainly would be nice to have an IVF center here--it would be nice to have a lot of different types of specialists here--but quite honestly, I don’t see it happening in the near future.”

The success rate of an IVF center depends greatly on how many procedures are done monthly, Surrey said, and right now the county is not large enough or demographically able to support one. Even if a center were to be built in a city such as Ventura, he said, patients in Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village would still be likely to travel to Los Angeles.

“You’d have to have every physician in the county referring people to that one center, and the physicians wouldn’t all do that,” Surrey said.

Monty Clark, Ventura County director of the Hospital Council of Southern California, also said the outlook for infertility patients here, at least for the time being, is unlikely to change.

“As far as I know,” he said, “there aren’t any plans for anything different.”