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Deaths - Background Information

The pages in this section provide information which is specifically about the National Records of Scotland’s (NRS's) statistics of deaths. 

Causes of deaths

• Death certificates and coding the causes of death
• Cause of death text and codes (PDF 28 Kb)
• Underlying cause of death codes (PDF 25 Kb)
• Causes of death - summary lists (PDF 13 Kb)
• Certain causes of death - use the links below to obtain definitions and, in some cases, other information about statistics on these causes of death:
  • Alcohol-related deaths
  • Clostridium difficile deaths
  • Drug-related Deaths
  • Winter Mortality
  • MRSA deaths
  • Probable suicides

Other background information

• Still Births and Infant Deaths
• Years of life lost (PDF 14 Kb)
• Quality of NRS Data on Deaths
• Fluctuations in, and possible unreliability of death statistics for small areas, for small groups or for short periods
• Place of Death and Place of Occurrence (of the event which caused the death - external causes only) (PDF 23 Kb)
• Information held in the database (Excel 42 Kb)
• Death statistics which are available from other Web sites

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Also relevant is much of the material on topics which are covered in the General section on Vital Events documentation because it applies to several types of event. For example, pages which are available from the general section provide information about the quality of some aspects of the Vital Events data which are relevant to the statistics about Deaths.

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