Deaths - Variation within Scotland
Last Updated: November 2017
In 2016, the overall death rate for Scotland was 10.5 deaths per 1,000 population. An equivalent figure can be calculated for each council area and for each NHS Board area. However, comparing the crude death rates of different areas could present a misleading picture, because of differences between their populations' age-structures and their balances between the sexes. Therefore, the comparisons that appear below use death rates which have been standardised for differences in the age/sex-distribution of the population in each area.
Standardised rates which are based on the age/sex-distribution of the population of Scotland as a whole enable comparisons of the death rates in different parts of Scotland with each other, and with the overall death rate for Scotland, which are not affected by differences in their populations' age/sex-distributions. However, it should be noted that the normal year-to-year fluctuations in the numbers of deaths will mean that areas with small populations may sometimes have rates that are unusually high, or unusually low.
Among the council areas, standardised death rates in 2016 were highest in Glasgow City (13.0 per 1,000 population), North Lanarkshire and West Dunbartonshire (12.1), East Ayrshire and Renfrewshire (11.7) and Dundee City and Inverclyde (11.5). Standardised death rates in 2016 were lowest in East Renfrewshire (8.5 per 1,000 population), Orkney Islands (8.6), Perth and Kinross and East Dunbartonshire (8.7).
Among the NHS Board areas, the standardised death rate was highest in Greater Glasgow and Clyde (11.6) and Lanarkshire (11.5), and lowest in Orkney (8.6) and Borders (9.0). All the other NHS Board areas had standardised death rates which were between 9.4 (Highland) and 10.8 (Ayrshire & Arran) per 1,000 population, and therefore did not differ greatly from the overall Scottish figure of 10.5 per 1,000 population.
Link
More Information about Deaths (National Records of Scotland website)