Vital Statistics for England and Wales, 1999; DVS1, DVS2, DVS3, DVS4, DVS4d, DVS5

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 mainly local and health authority level data for 1999: births and deaths summary data, births data, mortality data by cause, infant and perinatal mortality data. Some data at ward level are also included: births and deaths by wards and deaths by selected causes by wards.<br><br>For the second edition (2006), work was carried out on parts of the data by ESDS Government to produce more user-friendly tab-delimited ASCII files. For the third edition (October 2008), the files from DVS1 and DVS3 were added to complete the dataset. The data are also available in Excel and ONS ITELite format. <br><br>