Deaths in the Medical Officer of Health Reports, Glasgow 1898 - 1972

Angelopoulos, Konstantinos and Lazarakis, Spyridon and Mancy, Rebecca and Schroeder, Max (2021). Deaths in the Medical Officer of Health Reports, Glasgow 1898 - 1972. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-854730

This research aims to assess the medium-run implications of COVID-19 on income and health inequality, and possible policies that aim to mitigate these effects. The medium run is important because the impacts of COVID-19 on inequality are expected to persist for many years. Understanding how inequality changes over the medium run, and assessing mitigation policies beyond the short term, requires information on the evolution of income and health inequalities several years after an outbreak. To achieve this, we will combine models typically applied to modern datasets with quantitative data from historical periods that, unlike contemporary data, cover extended post-outbreak periods. We will use records from Glasgow since the end of the 19th century, covering a period of intense and volatile economic activity, as well as multiple disease outbreaks. We choose Glasgow because it is a large city demonstrating similar inequalities to those seen today, and because administrative records for Glasgow provide detailed relevant information. Our approach is the following. We will use a modelling framework that has been shown to be effective in capturing income inequality and the effects of recessions on this inequality. We will extend the modelling approach to also include health inequalities and ensure that both income and health inequalities are represented accurately using recent datasets. To set up the model so that it captures the effects of outbreaks on inequalities, we will use historical data from earlier times that include large disease outbreaks. The model will then allow us to examine the effects of different policy interventions for households with different socioeconomic characteristics.

Data description (abstract)

The “Medical Officer of Health Reports”, provide valuable, historic insights into the state of public health in Glasgow. We utilize the reports compiled by the Medical Officer of Health (MOH) to gather information on mortality from different diseases. We catalogue annual mortality rates for different diseases for the city covering the years 1898 to 1972.

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