You asked
Please provide:
1. The number of suicides;
2. Substance overdoses and
3. Cancer deaths that have occurred thus far this year.
This should include all death certificates that mention the above reasons for death.
Please also provide previous years statistics in relation to the above reasons for death, so that it can be easily compared.
Please also provide how many have died from suicides; substance overdoses and cancer so far this year in Hastings, East Sussex, and how this compares to previous years statistics.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Suicides
Unfortunately, will be unable to begin reporting on suicide deaths, that occurred during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, until early 2021.
We produce provisional suicide data for England on a quarterly basis, with the latest update including deaths registered from January to June 2020. The publication explains that the majority of suicides require an inquest, where a coroner must investigate the cause of death. The amount of time taken to hold an inquest causes a lag between the date the death occurred and the date the death is registered. We refer to this as a registration delay and registration delays for deaths caused by suicide tend to be five to six months on average. Because our data is based on death registrations, this delay means that most deaths recorded for 2020 so far would have occurred in 2019. More detailed information can be found in the publication.
You may be interested in our annual Suicides in the UK release. Please note, this is based on 2019 death registrations. Data is available in this publication for 2019 to 2011.
Our Suicides in England and Wales by local authority publication will provide number of suicides, suicide rates and median registration delays, by local authority in England and Wales, registered from 2002 to 2019.
Substance overdose
The most recent available analysis regarding substance overdose can be found in the Deaths related to Drugs poisoning publication. This provides data on deaths from substance overdose up until 2019. Drug-related deaths by local authority, 2019, England and Wales is available for mortality rates for deaths related to drug poisoning and drug misuse, and average registration delay, by local authority in England and Wales.
2019 deaths were published in October 2020, and we expect to publish deaths registered in 2020 in the summer or autumn of 2021. This delay is because in England and Wales, most deaths from substance abuse have to be certified by a coroner and cannot be registered until an inquest is completed.
Cancer
Deaths from leading causes of deaths in 2020, such as cancer, can be found in the Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales. This is a new publication which began in July 2020. This will provide provisional death registration data for England and Wales, broken down by sex, age and country.
Prior to this publication, please find our Analysis of death registrations not involving coronavirus (COVID-19), England and Wales: 28 December 2019 to 10 July 2020. This will provide an exploration of trends in non-COVID-19 deaths since 2 May 2020, how they compare with the five-year average, and how the nature of deaths from 2 May to 10 July may have changed from previous years when total numbers of non-COVID-19 deaths have returned to more expected levels.
Totals for deaths in 2020 from cancer will be available on our NOMIS web service and in future publications in 2021, once the data has been finalised.
You may also find the following mortality publications of interest:
The Deaths registered in England and Wales publication provides annual statistics for 2012 to 2019. This includes deaths registered deaths by age, sex, selected underlying causes of death and the leading causes of death.
Total deaths and COVID-19 deaths for 2020 are available in our Death registrations and occurrences by local authority and health board. This is a new publication providing provisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales, including deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19), by local authority, health board and place of death in the latest weeks for which data are available.
Data is only available for 2020 in this format, however, please see the Five-year average weekly deaths by place of death, England and Wales, deaths occurring between 2015 and 2019 publication which has a five-year average for 2015 to 2019 at local authority level.