NIPT - to do it or not?

In my first pregnancy I just had the NHS combined testing and it all came back low risk. If it had flagged anything then I might have followed up with a NIPT but I personally didn't see any need to have a private NIPT test otherwise. I'm doing the same for this pregnancy

Only do the nipt if you get high results on the combined screening x

NHS screening has only 80% sensitivity for downs syndrome. So it misses one in 5, which is very high. Unfortunately I was 'very low risk equivalent to 18 year old' and then private NIPT came back as positive in a previous pregnancy. I would always advise people to do NIPT if you can afford it.

Nhs will cover nipt if a high risk comes up on the combined screen, but as another commenter said there’s a chance of missing things in the combined screen so we opted to do nipt privately last time round and will do the same this time. Also as a fun little bonus you can usually find out the sex from the private nipt if you want to, so you don’t have to wait for 20wk scan! Obviously you can opt out of that if you want a surprise