In 2018 there were over 40 thousand deaths caused by ischaemic heart diseases in the United Kingdom, making it the leading cause of death in that year. Since 2001 there has been a noticeable increase in the number of people dying from dementia or alzheimers, which caused 26.5 thousand deaths in 2018, an increase of almost ten thousand when compared with 2012.

In 1948, over a quarter of deaths recorded in England and Wales were caused by heart disease. The National Health Service was founded in this year in the UK and aimed at improving the health of British citizens.

This statistic depicts the number of deaths in Great Britain, which only includes England and Wales, sorted by main causes of death in 2011. In that year, 5,937 people in England and Wales died from infections.

Deaths registered in private homes by age, sex, place of occurrence and selected underlying causes of death and the leading causes of death.

There were 11,607 deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending February 21, 2025, compared with 12,365 in the previous week. During this time period, the two weeks with the highest number of weekly deaths were in April 2020, with the week ending April 17, 2020, having 22,351 deaths, and the following week 21,997 deaths, a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Death and life expectancy As of 2022, the life expectancy for women in the UK was just over 82.5 years, and almost 78.6 years for men. Compared with 1765, when average life expectancy was under 39 years, this is a huge improvement in historical terms. Even in the more recent past, life expectancy was less than 47 years at the start of the 20th Century, and was under 70 as recently as the 1950s. Despite these significant developments in the long-term, improvements in life expectancy stalled between 2009/11 and 2015/17, and have even gone in decline since 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, for example, life expectancy at birth fell by 23 weeks for females, and 37 weeks for males.2. COVID-19 in the UK The first cases of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom were recorded on January 31, 2020, but it was not until a month later that cases began to rise exponentially. By March 5 of this year there were more than 100 cases, rising to 1,000 days later and passing 10,000 cumulative cases by March 26. At the height of the pandemic in late April and early May, there were around six thousand new cases being recorded daily. As of January 2023, there were more than 24.2 million confirmed cumulative cases of COVID-19 recorded in the United Kingdom, resulting in 202,156 deaths.

In 2023, the age-specific death rate for men aged 90 or over in England and Wales was 248.1 per one thousand population, and 215.1 for women. Except for infants that were under the age of one, younger age groups had the lowest death rate, with the death rate getting progressively higher in older age groups.

This publication of the SHMI relates to discharges in the reporting period February 2022 - January 2023. The SHMI is the ratio between the actual number of patients who die following hospitalisation at the trust and the number that would be expected to die on the basis of average England figures, given the characteristics of the patients treated there. The SHMI covers patients admitted to hospitals in England who died either while in hospital or within 30 days of being discharged. Deaths related to COVID-19 are excluded from the SHMI. To help users of the data understand the SHMI, trusts have been categorised into bandings indicating whether a trust's SHMI is 'higher than expected', 'as expected' or 'lower than expected'. For any given number of expected deaths, a range of observed deaths is considered to be 'as expected'. If the observed number of deaths falls outside of this range, the trust in question is considered to have a higher or lower SHMI than expected. The expected number of deaths is a statistical construct and is not a count of patients. The difference between the number of observed deaths and the number of expected deaths cannot be interpreted as the number of avoidable deaths or excess deaths for the trust. The SHMI is not a measure of quality of care. A higher than expected number of deaths should not immediately be interpreted as indicating poor performance and instead should be viewed as a 'smoke alarm' which requires further investigation. Similarly, an 'as expected' or 'lower than expected' SHMI should not immediately be interpreted as indicating satisfactory or good performance. Trusts may be located at multiple sites and may be responsible for 1 or more hospitals. A breakdown of the data by site of treatment is also provided, as well as a breakdown of the data by diagnosis group. Further background information and supporting documents, including information on how to interpret the SHMI, are available on the SHMI homepage (see Related Links). Information about the exclusion of COVID-19 from the SHMI can also be found on the same page. A link to the methodological changes statement which details the exclusion is also available in the Related Links section

There were 2,784 infant deaths in the United Kingdom in 2021, compared with 2,620 in the previous year. The number of infant deaths in 2020 was the fewest in the provided time period, especially compared with 1900 when there were 163,470 infant deaths.

Notes:

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The National Survey of Bereaved People (VOICES - Views of Informal Carers - Evaluation of Services) is an annual survey designed to measure the quality of end of life care. The VOICES survey particularly focuses on the last three months of life. Results are used to inform policy decisions and enable evaluation of the quality of end of life care by age group, sex, in different settings (home, hospital, care homes and hospices) and by different causes of death. Quality of end of life care is also included as an indicator in the NHS Outcomes Framework and the VOICES survey is used to monitor progress against this.

The Department of Health (DH) first commissioned the survey in 2011 to follow up on a commitment made in the End of Life Care Strategy. Previously, very little systematic information was available about the quality of care delivered to people approaching the end of life, despite reports from the Healthcare Commission and the Neuberger review highlighting deficiencies in care. The commissioning responsibility for the survey moved from DH to NHS England following the restructuring of the Health and Care systems in England in April 2013.

Each year a sample of approximately 49,000 adults who died in England is selected from the deaths registration database held by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). To ensure the sample represents the deaths in England for the given period and covers the key domains of interest, the sample is stratified according to the cause of death, place of death and geography. For the 2011 and 2012 surveys, geography was based on Primary Care Trust (PCT) clusters. For the 2013 survey onwards, this is based on NHS Area Teams (NHS Area Team 2013 has also been applied to the earlier datasets).

The VOICES questionnaire is sent by post to the person who registered the death of the deceased; this is usually a relative or friend of the deceased. Questionnaires are sent out between 4 and 11 months after the patient has died. As is standard in most postal surveys, if no response is received, this first questionnaire is then followed up with two reminders. Once fieldwork, data capture, cleaning and processing are complete, findings are disseminated at both the national and sub-national level.

Further information about the survey and links to related publications may be found on the ONS National Bereavement Survey (VOICES) QMI webpage.

End User Licence and Secure Access versions available
The UK Data Service holds standard End User Licence (EUL) and Secure Access versions of the National Survey of Bereaved People data. EUL data are available to registered users but Secure Access data are only available to ONS Accredited Researchers (in addition, project approval and successful completion of a stringent training course are required before access can be granted). The Secure Access version contains finer detail variables (e.g. IMD deciles as opposed to quintiles in the EUL data, Strategic Clinical Network in addition to NHS Area Teams, and more detailed information on age, causes, dates and place of death). Users are strongly advised to check whether the EUL data are sufficient for their research needs before making an application for the Secure Access version.


Main Topics:
Date, cause and place of death; quality and standards of medical, nursing, social and pastoral care in the last three months of life; support for relatives/carers; demographics of deceased person and respondent.

This statistic describes the percent distribution of disability-adjusted life-years in the United Kingdom among persons aged under 70 as of 2012, by condition and disease. Cardiovascular diseases contributed to 10.2 of all DALYs among those under 70 years of age. People with mental health problems have been found to have higher rates of physical illnesses than the general population. Mental health can cost up to 13 billion pounds per year and is listed as one of the most common reasons to claim disability benefits in Britain.

Disability-adjusted life-years

Mental health disorders and cancers are among the highest in terms of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) in the United Kingdom as of 2012 leading to 20.6 DALYs and 16.9 DALYs, respectively. DALYs are calculated by combining the years of life lost due to premature mortality and the years lost due to disability caused by the condition. In high-income countries, chronic diseases contribute to high DALY values. For example, cardiovascular diseases are among the leading causes of death worldwide at 17.3 million deaths in 2012. Chronic diseases can create indirect costs that can be a major hindrance in low-income families. Reduced income from loss of productivity, forgoing earnings from those that must care for the patient, and potential lost opportunity in young family members who leave school to care for the ill or to help household economy are indirect costs that chronic diseases can incur.

Neuropsychiatric conditions account for almost 15 percent of the global disease burden. However, this value is suspected to be much higher due to the complex relationships between physical and mental illness. It is also quite common for those with mental health disorders to be experiencing more than one disorder. People living in Alabama and California have some of the highest levels of poor mental health in the country, at 40.1 percent and 39.1 percent of the population reporting this condition, respectively, as of 2012. In the United States, 4.4 percent of individuals between 55 and 64 years of age have reported experiencing serious psychological distress.

Hospital admissions for serious accidental injury, with a length of stay exceeding 3 days (ICD-10 primary diagnosis in the range S00 through T98X and external cause code in the following ranges: V01-V99, W00-X59, Y40-Y84), standardised for the age and sex characteristics of the population and expressed as a rate per 100,000 population. The primary diagnosis field in Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) records information about the patient’s disease or condition and the codes are defined in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries and Causes of Death (ICD-10). Where applicable, the external cause field in HES records the environmental events and circumstances as the cause of injury, poisoning and other adverse effects. Comparison of crude episode rates between areas which may have different age structures would be inappropriate, because the age structure of the population can affect the number of episodes and thereby the crude episode rate. To overcome this problem, the common approach is to adjust or standardise the episode rates to take account of differences between the age structure of the populations. The directly age standardised episode rate is the rate of episodes that would occur in a standard population (in this case the European Standard Population) if that population were to experience the age-specific rates of the subject population (in this case individual local authority populations). The same standard population is used for males, females and persons. This means that rates can be compared across genders but also that rates for persons are standardised for age only and not for sex. This indicator relates to the Our Healthier Nation strategy target to reduce serious accidental injury. The target is monitored by the directly age-standardised episode rate for accidents for persons of all ages. The target is a 10% reduction by the year 2010 from the baseline rate in 1995/96. The strategy particularly identified that accidents are the greatest single threat to life for children and young people, and children up to the age of 15 years from unskilled families are five times more likely to die from accidental injury than those from professional families and falls are a major cause of death and disability for older people (3,000 people aged 65 and over die each year). Accidental injury is a leading cause of death and disability – the World Health Organization suggests that by 2020 injury will account for the largest single reason for loss of healthy human life-years. In the UK non-fatal injury results in 720,000 people being admitted to hospital a year and more than six million visits to accident and emergency departments. It is estimated that in the UK disability from injury is responsible for a considerably greater burden of potential healthy life-years lost than from cancer, or heart disease and stroke. This indicator has been discontinued and so there will be no further updates. Legacy unique identifier: P01059

There were 667,479 deaths in the United Kingdom in 2021, compared with 689,629 in 2020. Between 2003 and 2011, the annual number of deaths in the UK fell from 612,085 to just over 552,232. Since 2011 however, the annual number of annual deaths in the United Kingdom has steadily grown, with the number recorded in 2020, the highest since 1918 when there were 715,246 deaths. Both of these spikes in the number of deaths can be attributed to infectious disease pandemics. The great influenza pandemic of 1918, which was at its height towards the end of World War One, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a large number of deaths in 2020.  Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic The weekly death figures for England and Wales highlight the tragic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. In two weeks in April of 2020, there were 22,351 and 21,997 deaths respectively, almost 12,000 excess deaths in each of those weeks. Although hospitals were the most common location of these deaths, a significant number of these deaths also took place in care homes, with 7,911 deaths taking place in care homes for the week ending April 24, 2020, far higher than usual. By the summer of 2020, the number of deaths in England and Wales reached more usual levels, before a second wave of excess deaths hit the country in early 2021. Although subsequent waves of COVID-19 cases resulted in far fewer deaths, the number of excess deaths remained elevated throughout 2022. Long-term life expectancy trends As of 2022 the life expectancy for men in the United Kingdom was 78.57, and almost 82.57 for women, compared with life expectancies of 75 for men and 80 for women in 2002. In historical terms, this is a major improvement in relation to the mid 18th century, when the overall life expectancy was just under 39 years. Between 2011 and 2017, improvements in life expectancy in the UK did start to decline, and have gone into reverse since 2018/20. Between 2020 and 2022 for example, life expectancy for men in the UK has fallen by over 37 weeks, and by almost 23 weeks for women, when compared with the previous year.

Background. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a debilitating lung condition characterised by progressive lung function limitation. COPD is an umbrella term and encompasses a spectrum of pathophysiologies including chronic bronchitis, small airways disease and emphysema. COPD caused an estimated 3 million deaths worldwide in 2016, and is estimated to be the third leading cause of death worldwide. The British Lung Foundation (BLF) estimates that the disease costs the NHS around £1.9 billion per year. COPD is therefore a significant public health challenge. This dataset explores the impact of hospitalisation in patients with COPD during the COVID pandemic.

PIONEER geography The West Midlands (WM) has a population of 5.9 million & includes a diverse ethnic & socio-economic mix. There is a higher than average percentage of minority ethnic groups. WM has a large number of elderly residents but is the youngest population in the UK. There are particularly high rates of physical inactivity, obesity, smoking & diabetes. The West Midlands has a high prevalence of COPD, reflecting the high rates of smoking and industrial exposure. Each day >100,000 people are treated in hospital, see their GP or are cared for by the NHS.

EHR. University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is one of the largest NHS Trusts in England, providing direct acute services & specialist care across four hospital sites, with 2.2 million patient episodes per year, 2750 beds & 100 ITU beds. UHB runs a fully electronic healthcare record (EHR) (PICS; Birmingham Systems), a shared primary & secondary care record (Your Care Connected) & a patient portal “My Health”.

Scope: All hospitalised patients admitted to UHB during the COVID-19 pandemic first wave, curated to focus on COPD. Longitudinal & individually linked, so that the preceding & subsequent health journey can be mapped & healthcare utilisation prior to & after admission understood. The dataset includes ICD-10 & SNOMED-CT codes pertaining to COPD and COPD exacerbations, as well as all co-morbid conditions. Serial, structured data pertaining to process of care (timings, staff grades, specialty review, wards), presenting complaint, all physiology readings (pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturations), all blood results, microbiology, all prescribed & administered treatments (fluids, nebulisers, antibiotics, inotropes, vasopressors, organ support), all outcomes. Linked images available (radiographs, CT).

Available supplementary data: More extensive data including wave 2 patients in non-OMOP form. Ambulance, 111, 999 data, synthetic data.

Available supplementary support: Analytics, Model build, validation & refinement; A.I.; Data partner support for ETL (extract, transform & load) process, Clinical expertise, Patient & end-user access, Purchaser access, Regulatory requirements, Data-driven trials, “fast screen” services.

Between 1953 and 2021, the death rate of the United Kingdom fluctuated between a high of 12.2 deaths per 1,000 people in 1962 and a low of 8.7 in 2011. From 2011 onwards, the death rate creeped up slightly and, in 2020, reached 10.3 deaths per 1,000 people. In 2021, the most recent year provided here, the death rate was ten, a decline from 2020 but still higher than in almost every year in the twenty-first century. The recent spike in the death rate corresponds to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, with the first cases recorded in early 2020. Most deaths since 1918 in 2020 In 2020, there were 689,629 deaths in the United Kingdom, the highest in more than a century. Although there were fewer deaths in 2021, at 667,479, this was still far higher than in recent years. When looking at the weekly deaths in England and Wales for this time period, two periods stand out for reporting far more deaths than usual. The first period was between weeks 13 and 22 of 2020, which saw two weeks in late April report more than 20,000 deaths. Excess deaths for the week ending April 17, 2020, were 11,854, and 11,539 for the following week. Another wave of deaths occurred in January 2021, when there were more than 18,000 deaths per week between weeks three and five of that year. Improvements to life expectancy slowing Between 2020 and 2022, life expectancy in the United Kingdom was approximately 82.57 years for women and 78.57 years for men. Compared with life expectancy in 1980/82 this marked an increase of around six years for women and almost eight years for men. Despite these long-term developments, improvements to life expectancy have been slowing in recent years, and have declined since 2017/19. As of 2022, the country with the highest life expectancy in the World was Japan, which was 84.5 years, followed by South Korea, at 83.6 years.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The dataset was created as part of the Victorian Census Project at Staffordshire University.
The main aims of the project were to computerise the 1861 Census Reports, the Registrar General's Annual Report for 1861 and the Registrar General's Decennial Supplement for 1851-60. Further information about the Victorian Census Project can be found at:
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/census>
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/census
Main Topics:

The dataset consists of two files, each containing data for registration districts in 1861.
The main file contains 114 variables relating to : buildings and dwellings; male and female population; marriages 1851-61; births 1851-61; deaths 1851-61; ages of males and females; marital status of males and females aged 20 and over; disabilities and institutionalised populations; birthplaces of the population; occupations and employment status of males and females aged 20 and over; causes of death 1851-61; and ages at death 1851-61.
The secondary file contains 17 variables relating to: grid references; percentage change in population 1851-61; population density; gender ratio; males employed in textiles per 1000; males employed in metals per 1000; males in the armed forces per 1000; agricultural workers per 1000 males; males in mining and bricks per 1000; males in manufacturing per 1000; women domestic servants per 1000.

Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

The National Diabetes Audit (NDA) is part of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP) which is commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) and funded by NHS England. The NDA is managed by NHS Digital in partnership with Diabetes UK. The NDA measures the effectiveness of diabetes healthcare against NICE Clinical Guidelines and NICE Quality Standards, in England and Wales. The NDA collects and analyses data for use by a range of stakeholders to drive changes and improvements in the quality of services and health outcomes for people with diabetes. This short report details the top level findings for the 2017-18 audit. The audit collected data during May and June 2018, for the period 01 January 2017 to 31 March 2018. The top level findings, along with supporting data at Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), Local Health Board (LHB), GP practice and specialist diabetes service have been made available to provide data back to services in a timely manner that can help drive improvements in the quality of diabetes care locally. The next report will contain full key findings, recommendations and results of initial analyses into cardiovascular risk reduction and the use of statins. We will communicate to users when the date for this report has been finalised.

Although vaccination was discovered in England in 1796, the practice was not made compulsory until 1853 in England and Wales, and 1864 in Scotland. For this reason, the number of smallpox deaths per million people fluctuated from year to year, often doubling or tripling from one year to the next, before the death rate for both countries settled in the late 1960s. The Great Pandemic of the 1870s, which was the last major smallpox pandemic in Europe, caused the number of smallpox deaths to soar once more, peaking at over 1,000 deaths per million people in England and Wales in 1871, and at over 820 deaths per million people in Scotland in 1872. During this pandemic, mandatory vaccination became enforced, where parents who did not vaccinate their children within the first three years of life were penalized with fines or imprisonment, and this helped the smallpox death rate to remain low and plateau in the final two decades of the nineteenth century; an estimated 11,000 of these penalties were handed out during the 1880s, which included 115 prison sentences for failure to vaccinate children. Smallpox cases in Britain were rare throughout the early twentieth century; not counting a lab accident in 1978 that infected two people (one of whom died), natural smallpox cases were eradicated in Britain in 1934.

Following Edward Jenner's development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796, the death rate due to smallpox in England and Wales dropped significantly. Although Jenner's work was published in 1797, it would take over half a century for the British government to make vaccination compulsory for all infants. Between 1847 and 1853, when vaccination was optional, children under the age of five years had, by far, the largest number of deaths; the total death rate was 1.6 thousand deaths per million people, which was more than five times the overall death rate due to smallpox. When compulsory vaccination was introduced, this helped bring the smallpox death rate in this age group down by over fifty percent between 1854 and 1871. When compulsory vaccination was enforced with penalties in the wake of the Great Pandemic of the 1870s, the smallpox death rate among children under the age of five dropped to approximately fifteen percent of its optional vaccination level. Increase among adults Along with the youngest age group, children aged five to ten years also saw their death rates decrease by roughly two thirds, and the death rate among those aged ten to 15 declined by just under one third during this time. It was among adults, aged above 15 years, where the introduction of mandatory vaccination had an adverse effect on their death rates; increasing by fifty percent among young adults, and almost doubling among those aged 25 to 45. The reason for this was because, contrary to Jenner's theory, vaccination did not guarantee lifelong protection, and immunization gradually wore off making vaccinated people susceptible to the virus again in adulthood. There was some decline in the smallpox death rates among adults throughout the 1870s and 1880s, as revaccination became more common, and the enforced vaccination of children prevented smallpox from spreading as rapidly as in the pre-vaccination era. Overall trends While the introduction of mandatory vaccination saw the number of smallpox deaths increase for age groups above 15 years, the overall rate among all ages decreased, due to the huge drop in deaths among infants and children. The smallpox death rate dropped by over one quarter when compulsory vaccination was introduced, and it then fell to just over one third of it's optional-vaccination level when these measures were enforced. The development of the smallpox vaccine and the implementation of mandatory vaccination led to the eradication of the disease in Britain by 1934, and contributed greatly to the demographic developments of the twentieth century, such as the declines in fertility rate and birth rate, and the increase in life expectancy.

In 2020, cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths in the United Kingdom accounted for 25 percent of all male deaths in the age group 55 to 74 years, while CVD accounted for 17 percent of female deaths in this age group. In general, CVD deaths accounted for larger shares in the older age groups. The most common CVDs are heart attack, stroke, heart failure, arrhythmia, and heart valve complications. Symptoms of CVDs include chest pain, breathlessness, fatigue, swollen limbs, and irregular heartbeat.