The South-Eastern Health Board has set up a team to investigate how a confidential file on an 18-year-old autistic Kilkenny man was found lying amongst some litter in the garden of a city housing estate on Thursday.
The file marked "confidential, not to be handled by patient" and not to be removed from clinic, contained doctor's reports, assessments and letters about the young man who was diagnosed as having autism last year. The file also contained details of the family's circumstances.
Yesterday the mother of the young man told Radio Kilkenny that a man from a neighbouring housing estate had arrived at her door with the file on Thursday morning. He had apparently picked it up in his front garden as he was putting his rubbish out.
The woman said she was deeply upset at what was contained in the file. She said she had been trying to get her son's files from the health board for years with little success.
A spokesperson for the South-Eastern Health Board said that the board had set up an investigation team to report on the matter by next Friday. The team would "set out to establish how the file came to be in a public place, who had responsibility for the file, who had access to or custody of the file, either within the SEHB or externally, and whether SEHB procedures have been breached."