Mental health officials in Oxford are right to launch an urgent inquiry into how a patient's file was found discarded in a street.

It is intolerable that such confidential documents should be handled so carelessly.

If you called a hospital and asked for details of a patient, you would be told in no uncertain terms that the information was private and confidential.

Yet this Littlemore Hospital patient's history was left for all to see in a gutter.

Fortunately, the file was spotted and picked up by passerby Anthony Barrett while he was walking his dog.

Although he admits he looked through it, he had the presence of mind to hand it back to the hospital.

This is the second time this year that confidential documents have been found in an Oxford street.

We reported in March how birth certificates and photographs of young people in care were found strewn outside Warwick House, a former children's home in Iffley Road, Oxford.

It is clear that procedures in some of our most sensitive public services need to be tightened.

It makes us wonder how many important documents go missing, fall into the wrong hands and are never recovered.