Manchester’s alarmingly high rate of death!

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Revealed: Manchester has highest death rate in England and Wales

By Dominic Claeys-Jackson

Manchester has the highest death rate in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

With a 2011 death rate 32% above the national level, the authority of Manchester recorded 3,487 deaths in a population of just 503,000.

The report also showed that eight of Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs had death rates over the national level, with an overall rate of 15% above.

This was through seeing 23,137 recorded deaths in 2011 for a population of 2,682,500.

Tameside held the second highest death rate in Greater Manchester at 26% and Salford third at 21% over the expected level.

However Stockport and Trafford fared much better with death rates 5% below the national average.

The data is structured using the Standardised Mortality Ratio (SMR) – the ideal method for national comparison as results account for the differing age structures of each local population.

The SMR compares the number of observed deaths in a population with the number of expected deaths if age-specific death rates were the same as a standard population.

The ONS report claims that the statistic reflects underlying differences in factors such as income deprivation, socio-economic status and health behaviour.

Manchester’s alarmingly high rate is in sharp contrast with South Cambridgeshire, which is 26% below the national average with 970 deaths in an area of 148,800 (0.65%).

And the news of Manchester’s high rate comes in a report which shows death rates in England and Wales falling to their lowest recorded level.

In 2011, there were 484,367 deaths registered nationally compared with 493,242 the previous year, a fall of 1.8%.

Cancer accounted for 30% of deaths in 2011, with circulatory diseases accounting for 29%, though both rates have fell dramatically over the last decade.

The ONS claimed that positive lifestyle changes and medical advances were the key reason for the national decline in death rates.

However, in each of Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs, births outweighed deaths, a trend mirrored nationally.

Manchester – despite having Greater Manchester’s largest amount of births in 2011 (8,094) – had the lowest birth rate in the region, with 61.0 live births per 1,000 women aged 15-44.

Oldham had the highest, at a rate of 72.7 live births per 1,000 women aged 15-44.

Greater Manchester on the whole saw 37,584 births in 2011, with 723,913 nationally – a 0.1% increase from 2010 which had 732,165 births.

Credit: http: //mancunianmatters.co.uk/content/18106114-revealed-manchester-has-highest-death-rate-england-and-wales