You said
FOI/2021/2215
I would like to know if suicide rates have increased in UK doctors in the last 5 years.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We are responsible for the provision of mortality statistics for England and Wales. National Records Scotland (NRS) and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland and Northern Ireland. They can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.
The number of suicides for England and Wales for 1981 to 2019 are available here: Suicides in England and Wales: 2019 registrations. This publication will be updated to include 2020 data in September 2021; when a publication date is finalised it will be announced via our release calendar.
For suicides by occupation, please refer to our Suicide by occupation, England and Wales, 2011 to 2019 registrations publication.
Data on occupation is coded using the Standard Occupation Classification (SOC 2010). In all, there are 9 major groups of occupations (for example, skilled trades occupations); 25 sub-major groups (for example, skilled construction and building trades); 90 minor groups (for example, building finishing trades); and more than 350 individual occupations (for example, painters and decorators). Full lists of occupations used in the analysis are reported in the accompanying data tables, and descriptions of these can be found in ONS Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) Hierarchy. The report is structured so that it describes larger categories of occupations before moving on to describe risk in specific occupations.
You might also be interested in this FOI Response regarding suicide by occupation.
Suspected suicide deaths are investigated by a coroner in what's known as an inquest. The amount of time it takes to hold an inquest causes a delay between the date of death and the date of death registration, referred to as a registration delay. Registration delays for deaths caused by suicide tend to be 5 to 6 months on average. More information about the impact of registration delays is available here.
We also produce provisional suicide data for England on a quarterly basis, with the most recent update including deaths that were registered from October to December of 2020. This publication presented numbers of deaths registered in 2020 with the median registration delay in Quarter 4 2020 being 177 days.