Number of deaths recorded as suicide in Herefordshire in the last two years
Case reference FOI2023/00466
Published 28 April 2023
Request
Parliament will hear a new Bill regarding young people's mental health and well being being included in the National Curriculum, I am trying to get my MP to support this bill.
Therefore I would like to know the number of deaths recorded as suicide in the county for last 2 years - Male, female and age group.
Response
Parliament will hear a new Bill regarding young people's mental health and well-being being included in the National Curriculum, I am trying to get my MP to support this bill.
Therefore I would like to know the number of deaths recorded as suicide in the county for last 2 years - Male, female and age group.
The Primary Care Mortality Database (PCMD) is a statistical dataset based on death registrations in England and Wales, used by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for their mortality analysis and made available to local authority public health analysts for local areas.
According to the PCMD, 16 suicides were recorded in Herefordshire in 2021 and 16 in 2022.
Over the period of 2021-2022 the demographics of the people whose deaths were registered as suicide are:
· Sex
o 23 male
o 9 female
· Age band
o 6 under 30
o 8 30-44s
o 13 45-64s
o 5 65 and over
Standard practice for analysis of suicides is to use the date that the death was registered, not the date of occurrence. This is because registrations can be months later than the actual death due to awaiting the outcome of inquests. Therefore these figures include deaths which occurred before 2021 but were registered during 2021 and they are unlikely to include all suicides which occurred in 2022 as any which occurred later in the year may not have been registered yet. The figures are also subject to change when ONS publish their official analysis for 2022 in September 2023 due to coding changes.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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