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While the Gov­ern­ment crit­i­cised the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion for fail­ing to im­prove the Chil­dren’s Life Fund Au­thor­i­ty (CLFA), Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Dr Amery Browne said many of the 80 re­ject­ed ap­pli­ca­tions were due to bleak prog­noses.

Mak­ing her maid­en con­tri­bu­tion in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day, Min­istry of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment’s Par­lia­men­tary Sec­re­tary, Dr Na­tal­ie Chai­tan-Ma­haraj, re­vealed that sev­er­al chil­dren died while await­ing ap­provals un­der the fund. She cit­ed the 2022 case of 14-year-old Tris­tan Ram­lochan, who suc­cumbed to acute lym­phoblas­tic leukaemia while wait­ing for fund­ing and trav­el arrange­ments. De­lays in his flight meant he be­came too ill to trav­el. An­oth­er child, Ba­by Mir­a­cle Cross, died in March 2016 while funds were still be­ing processed.

Chai­tan-Ma­haraj not­ed that while Cana­da’s Chil­dren’s Hos­pi­tal Foun­da­tion and the UK’s NHS Rare Dis­ease Fund typ­i­cal­ly take be­tween sev­en and 14 days to process emer­gency ap­provals, the CLFA takes be­tween two and four months.