As has been characteristic of previous years, the level of coincidence of parish of occurrence of live birth and parish of residence of mother was high for most parishes. St. Catherine, St. Thomas,

As has been characteristic of previous years, the level of coincidence of parish of occurrence of live birth and parish of residence of mother was high for most parishes. St. Catherine, St. Thomas, Portland, Hanover, Trelawny, Clarendon and St. Elizabeth all had over 95% coincidence. The other seven parishes had coincidences of below 88% with Kingston and Manchester having the lowest at 20.4% and 54.2% respectively.

There were seven mothers whose residence was outside of Jamaica at the time of the birth of their child. Two resided in Canada, two in Turks and Caicos, and one each in Antigua, the United States of America and Dominica.

Turning to the absolute values for the individual parishes, the leading parish was again St. Andrew with 8,251 of those live births to mother residing in that parish. St. Catherine and Clarendon followed with 6,974 and 4,064 respectively.

(Table 7 and 7a)

From Table B, interesting observations can be made. Though St. Andrew, St. Catherine and Clarendon have the highest absolute values for live births to mother residence, the values for live births per 1,000 of each parish’s population relate another trend. Here the leading parishes are all from the Western Region: Hanover, Westmoreland and St. James with 19.3, 17.9 and 17.7 respectively.

(Table B)

TABLE B: LIVE BIRTHS HSOWING PARISH OF RESIDENCE OF MOTHER AND CORRESPONDING RATES PER POPULATION FOR 2004