You asked
I would like to know the following information regarding Eastbourne General District hospital, East Sussex, from March 2020 to date under the Freedom of Information act :
Total number of Covid 19 deaths
Total number of deaths with underlying conditions
Breakdown of ages at death
We said
Thank you for your request.
In order to provide information specifically for Eastbourne General District hospital, East Sussex, we would be required to create bespoke analysis, which we are not obligated to do under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000. Furthermore, if we were to create this dataset, we would be unable to disclose the information, as it would constitutes personal information about body corporate. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) makes it an offence to release personal information. Personal information is any information held by the UK Statistics Authority for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. As disclosure of the requested information is prohibited by another enactment, Section 44 FOIA applies. Section 44 is an absolute exemption and therefore no test of the public interest is required.
However, you may find the following information related to your request useful:
COVID-19 Deaths by local authority
Please see the following publication: Death registrations and occurrences by local authority and health board. Data is available for Eastbourne in the publication. In the tables labelled 'Registrations – Pivot table' and 'Occurrences – Pivot table', you can see how the mortality figures vary week on week, using the drop-down toggle and filtering on the week number and cause of death options.
For clarity: The filter/drop-down on the pivot tables for 'All-causes' does not contain COVID-19 deaths. By default, both options are ticked. If you were to untick the COVID-19 option it would deduct from the total deaths, leaving you with deaths from all other causes. Additionally, if both were ticked and you unticked All-causes, it would leave you with the total number of COVID-19 deaths.
We also provide a facility via customise my data, you can also filter deaths by week and location here as well.
COVID-19 deaths by age group are available in the weekly deaths bulletin. This can be found in the 'Covid-19 – Weekly registrations' table. Unfortunately, we cannot aggregate this to a lower geography in line with our disclosure policy.
COVID-19 deaths by underlying cause
We have been producing Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales in the response to the pandemic. This publication provides a greater insight into the leading underlying causes of death groups for deaths occurring in England and Wales between March and June 2020.
Provisional monthly death registration data for England and Wales, broken down by sex, age and country are now available in this monthly publication: Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales. This publication contains data from July onwards and includes deaths due to COVID-19 and leading causes of death. Leading causes is also available on table 11 and includes figures for the five-year average.
We are no longer publishing monthly COVID-19 deaths with details around the death such as pre-existing conditions or no underlying cause. The number of deaths in some areas of the data can become very small, i.e. specific and uncommon causes, so aggregating this to a small geography poses a disclosure risk, making it entirely possible to identify individual records. Due to the increase in the number of COVID-19 we are assessing how to resume this dataset safely.
If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk