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Birth statistics, particularly for areas within Scotland, which are available from other web sites

The General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) publishes the numbers of births for Local Authority areas and Health Board areas in the Vital Events Reference Tables, which are available on this website. For example, Table 3.8 provides the numbers of live births in each Local Authority area, and in each Health Board area, broken down by whether the parents were married to each other, and (if they were not) whether the birth was registered jointly, and (if so) whether the parents' addresses were the same.

GROS does not publish the numbers of births for geographical areas which are smaller than Local Authorities. However, some such information is available from other official web sites, which present information on births (produced from data which GROS supplied to those bodies) alongside other statistics for areas within Scotland.

Other official web sites may also make available (for Scotland as a whole, or for areas within Scotland) figures which are on a different basis from those published by GROS - for example, they may provide age-sex-standardised rates which they produced using the European Standard Population.

The main sites concerned are listed below, with notes on the kinds of figures for births that they provided at the time that this note was written (the details of what is available may have changed subsequently, of course). 

Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics (SNS)

SNS data include the following statistics on births:

• numbers of males, females and in total, and the percentage who were born to unmarried parents. The geographies for which these statistics are available varies: in most cases, they are available for Local Authorities, Scottish Parliament Constituencies, Wards and Intermediate Geographies.

Scottish Public Health Observatory (ScotPHO) - Comparative Health – CHP Profiles

ScotPHO provides a range of health-related statistics for Health Boards, Community Health Partnerships, Intermediate Geography Zones, and areas which were defined locally by some of the Health Boards. The following birth-related data are included:

• live births;
• "low weight" live births;
• teenage pregnancies;
• mothers smoking during pregnancy.

Information about the methods and definitions used by ScotPHO to produce these figures is set out in a document available on that web site.

Information Services Division (ISD) of NHS Scotland

ISD provides a wide range of health-related statistics. 

"Births and babies" tables include: 

• numbers of live births and stillbirths by Health Board, Local Authority and Community Health Partnership area;
• numbers of live births by hospital.

"Teenage pregnancy" tables include figures by Health Board, Local Authority and deprivation quintile.