Cause-specific mortality, particularly for cancers and heart disease, provide commonly available indicators for policy monitoring. However, defining appropriate population sub-groups of interest has, in the past, normally been limited solely to information provided on death certificates - and coded by the General Registry Office (GRO). In terms of ‘Section 75’ groups (S75) this amounts to reliable information for gender, age and marital status only with information on social class commonly recognised as being neither as...

Both Northern Ireland and Scotland have been shown to be more deprived and to suffer higher levels of morbidity and mortality than other regions in the UK. Previous work comparing Scotland to England and Wales showed that even after controlling for deprivation, Scotland still experienced an excess of mortality, a phenomenon which has become known as the “Scottish effect”. To date, no detailed comparisons of the relationship between deprivation and health in Northern Ireland and...

Suicide rates vary markedly between geographic areas but it is unclear whether or not this is due to differences in the populations of the areas (composition effects) or to factors which operate at an area level (contextual effects). This study uses to NI-LS to examine a number of area level characteristics to determine if they are independently related to suicide risk after adjustment for individual and family characteristics.