Deeply concerning changes to UK health trends have been noted since the early 2010s, including a widening of mortality inequalities. Given the importance of urban areas to national health outcomes, we sought to address gaps in the evidence by examining trends in intra-city mortality inequalities across Britain, including assessing the impact of the peak COVID-19 pandemic period. Age-standardized mortality rates were calculated (for England, Scotland, and 10 major UK cities) by age (all ages, 0-64 years), sex, year (1981-2020), and country-specific and city-specific area-based quintiles of socio-economic deprivation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: It has been proposed that part of the explanation for higher mortality in Scotland compared with England and Wales, and Glasgow compared with other UK cities, relates to greater ethnic diversity in England and Wales. We sought to assess the extent to which this excess was attenuated by adjusting for ethnicity. We additionally explored the role of country of birth in any observed differences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: It is increasingly recognised that large numbers of hospital inpatients have entered the last year of their lives.
Aim: To establish the likelihood of death within 12 months of admission to hospital; to examine the influence on survival of a cancer diagnosis made within the previous 5 years; to assess whether previous emergency admissions influenced mortality; and to compare mortality with that of the wider Scottish population.
Design: Incident cohort study.
Objective: To compare the trends in mortality inequalities by educational attainment with trends using area deprivation.
Setting: Scotland and England & Wales (E&W).
Participants: All people resident in Scotland and E&W between 1981 and 2011 aged 35-79 years.
Given previous evidence that not all Scotland's higher mortality compared to England & Wales (E&W) can be explained by deprivation, the aim was to enhance understanding of this excess by analysing changes in deprivation and mortality in Scotland and E&W between 1981 and 2011. Mortality was compared by means of direct standardisation and log-linear Poisson regression models, adjusting for age, sex and deprivation. Different measures of deprivation were employed, calculated at different spatial scales.
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