Other causes included intentional selfpoisoning, drug abuse and
undetermined intent.
* Includes deaths from all intents (i.e., unintentional injuries, suicides, homicides, deaths of
undetermined intent, and deaths attributed to legal intervention).
The new figures were released by Scottish Public Health Observatory, and include "events of
undetermined intent".
With regard to mortality, measures were taken together with the Instituto Medico Legal (the coroner's Office) to improve the registration of the external cause of death and reduce the proportion of deaths where the cause is classified as event of
undetermined intent.
accidental discharge, 851; suicide, 19,766; homicide, 11,101;
undetermined intent, 222.
Ten percent of deaths were of
undetermined intent and 1.3 percent involved legal intervention, which is defined as deaths caused by law enforcement or other people with legal authority to use deadly force.
In England and Wales, suicide is defined as deaths given an underlying cause of intentional self-harm or injury/poisoning of
undetermined intent. The figures from the Office for National Statistics are for persons aged between 10 and 34 years old and deaths of non-residents are excluded.
We included all cases in which the underlying cause of death was ascribed to cause-specific codes in the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) [13] that referred to a gunshot injury, whether intentionally (including self-harm and assault) or unintentionally inflicted or inflicted with
undetermined intent (Table 1).
The National Statistics definition of suicide includes deaths given an underlying cause of intentional selfharm or an injury/poisoning of
undetermined intent.
It was considered as outcome variable the intentionality of deaths (accidental causes, intentional causes, legal intervention and
undetermined intent).
However, in 2012-13 there were just over 9,600 admissions in NHS hospitals in Wales for "intentional self-harm or an event of an
undetermined intent" - down by nearly 11% on 2011-12.
The majority of deaths were suicides (62.8 percent) followed by homicides and deaths caused by law enforcement using deadly force (24.4 percent), deaths of
undetermined intent (12.2 percent), and unintentional firearm deaths (0.7 percent).