§ Mr. Cyril Smithasked the Secretary of State for Social Services (1) if he will make a statement on the payment of compensation to children, or their parents, blinded as a result of their being placed in oxygen tents when born prematurely; and if he will take steps to 369W enable such compensation to be backdated to include all cases occurring since 1947;
(2) how many children have been blinded as a consequence of being put into oxygen tents when born prematurely; how many of that total were as a consequence of the malfunctioning of the machine; and how many as a consequence of human error.
§ Sir K. JosephThe information is not available, but an analysis of records of registered blind people in England and Wales for the period 1951 to 1968, the last year for which figures are available, showed that in 480 cases the cause of blindness was recorded as retrolental fibroplasia. This is a condition statistically associated with oxygen therapy given to premature babies. Available statistics do not, however, establish whether all these were cases of that kind, nor whether there is an exclusive relationship between the condition and that therapy, nor whether, positively or negatively, the cases reported arose from either malfunctioning of equipment or human error. But any question of compensation would be a matter for the courts and in the absence of negligence does not arise.
While there is no question of this representing compensation, it is open to the parents of children in this group below age 16 to apply for assistance to the Family Fund, administered on my behalf by the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust. I cannot say whether help could be given in a particular case, but I am sending the hon. Member a copy of the trust's explanatory leaflet.