Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD)

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation is a relative measure of deprivation across nearly 7,000 small areas in Scotland called data zones. 

If an area is identified as ‘deprived’, this can relate to people having a low income but it can also mean fewer resources or opportunities. SIMD records the extent to which an area is deprived across seven domains: income, employment, education, health, access to services, crime and housing, and each of these domains can be looked at separately if needed.

SIMD is the Scottish Government’s standard approach to identify areas of deprivation in Scotland. It can help improve understanding about the outcomes and circumstances of people living in the most deprived areas in Scotland. It can also allow effective targeting of policies and funding where the aim is to wholly or partly tackle or take account of area concentrations of multiple deprivation.

SIMD ranks data zones from most deprived (ranked 1) to least deprived (ranked 6,976). Often SIMD scores are presented as quintiles with 20% of the Scottish population in each category ranging from most deprived to least deprived. 

It’s important to remember:

• SIMD is an area-based measure of relative deprivation: not every person in a highly deprived area will themselves be experiencing high levels of deprivation.
• The Scottish SIMD quintiles are unequally distributed in Grampian. For example only about 6% of our population live in the 20% ‘most deprived’ areas. A local SIMD measure is also available and this has 20% of the Grampian population in each deprivation category so it’s good for comparisons within our health board.
• Data zones in rural areas tend to cover a large land area and reflect a more mixed picture of people experiencing different levels of deprivation. This means that SIMD is less helpful at identifying the smaller pockets of deprivation found in more rural areas, compared to the larger pockets found in urban areas. SIMD domain indicators can still be useful in rural areas if analysed separately from urban data zones or combined with other data.

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