NISRA provisional death statistics are based on death registration information collected by the General Register Office.
Information on the quality of the data used to produce death statistics is available in the Northern Ireland Deaths Background Quality Report.
Excess Deaths
‘Excess’ deaths have typically been defined as the number of deaths recorded, above the number that might be expected to occur, in an ‘average’ year. A common UK-wide approach to producing national estimates of excess mortality has been developed and agreed across government and the devolved administrations. A blog giving background information to this development work was published by ONS on Thursday 15 February and a methodology paper and data tables, including breakdowns for the constituent administrations in the UK, and was released by ONS at 9.30am on 20 February 2024.
To supplement this, NISRA has published a short explainer paper, providing an overview of the changes in the methodology for calculating the estimate of expected deaths used to determine excess deaths, and the impact that will have in Northern Ireland, and an extraction from the UK dataset of the Northern Ireland specific data for the convenience of users.
- Northern Ireland information paper on excess, deaths change in methodology
- Northern Ireland back series of excess deaths
From Friday, 23 February, the new methodology was adapted to report on excess deaths in Table 1 of the weekly deaths tables. The historical final weekly deaths data was also expanded to include estimates of expected and excess deaths based on the new methodology, and going forward, excess deaths will also be included in the tables of our Annual Report of the Registrar General.