Deaths by suicide in the Cardiff and Vale Health Board 2017 to 2022

FOI Ref: FOI/2022/4082

You asked

Please supply all information regarding deaths by suicide over the last five years (January 2017 - January 2022) in the Cardiff & Vale health board.

If possible, could you break the numbers down into yearly statistics so that we are able to see how the numbers either rise or fall.

We said

Thank you for your enquiry.

2016 to 2020 data

We hold analysis of suicides by local authority as part of our 'Customer my data' service, accessible via the following link, Customise my data, and in the following table:

For information at health board level, this is available to request as bespoke analysis for years 2016 - 2020. These services are subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resource, and agreement to costs. Such enquiries can be made to the Health Analysis and Life Events Customer Services team on Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.

2021 and 2022 data

Most deaths caused by suicide require an inquest where a coroner investigates the death. The amount of time it takes to hold an inquest causes a lag 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.

Therefore, our most up-to-date analysis for suicide data are our quarterly provisional figures, accessible via the following link: Deaths caused by suicide by quarter in England. This dataset provides suicides that have been registered quarterly from 2001 up to Q3 2021. Quarterly figures for England are provided in table 1. We do not hold quarterly figures for Wales.

Suicide data for 2021 will be published in September/October 2022 which will include deaths by local authority level.