FOUR months ago we questioned the complacency of Oxford Health, the NHS mental health services trust for the county, following the suicide of Graham Kirtland.

The trust assured the public it had changed its systems following Mr Kirtland’s death because failings within its Crisis team’s handling of the case had been identified.

There was the usual official statement about learning from “this incident” – that incident being a death of a man.

Yet no mention was made that there had been another suicide, that of Gareth Christian, soon afterwards raising similar concerns about a system that effectively ignored a red flag about a man’s mental health.

Many will say mental health professionals can only do so much and that if someone is so disturbed as to want to take their lives, they will eventually succeed.

Yet the two cases are damning demonstrations of a mental health system where getting out from behind a desk to make a proper informed decision about them seemingly failed to happen.

The question is, has Oxford Health lost sight of the fact that it is people it deals with, not files?

And if you think that is unfair on a NHS trust that last year was paid £161m to perform its mental health services, you may be interested to learn that the press statements on both these deaths are largely the same — seemingly written using the same form.

The trust also refused to answer yesterday whether, because two deaths have highlighted two systemic failings, a full review of all its dealings with patients is needed.