Vital Statistics for England and Wales: Conceptions by Ward, 1994-1997

The purpose of the <i>Vital Statistics for England and Wales</i> data is to record the numbers of conceptions, live births, stillbirths, deaths and causes of death for persons in England and Wales, by gender and age. Data are available at local authority, health authority and ward level. Individual studies in the series record various parts of these data. Changes have been made over time to the way in which the Office for National Statistics (ONS) collects vital statistics data, resulting in some variation in the content of later studies in the series. Further information may be found in the <i>Key Population and Vital Statistics</i> reports available from the ONS web site.<br><br>During 2006, Sam Smith and colleagues at ESDS Government carried out work on various studies in the series prior to 2002, to improve the data format. The resulting files have been redeposited at the UKDA. More information is available in the documentation for the studies concerned.<br><br> The data cover conceptions in 1994-1997, aggregated at ward level, which led to maternities or to abortions under the 1967 Act. They do not include conceptions resulting in spontaneous miscarriages during the first 23 weeks of gestation (data for these are not collected centrally) nor any illegal abortions.<br><br>For the second edition (August 2006), work was carried out on the data by ESDS Government (see above) to produce more user-friendly tab-delimited ASCII files. The data are also now available in Excel, SPSS and Stata in addition to the previous ONS ITELite format.<br><br>