The Public Health Performance Project used the public health core functions that were endorsed by the National Public Health Partnership in 2000, to develop performance indicators for public health. 17 These core functions differ from the categories used for national public health expenditure reporting 18 , resulting in difficulties in aligning data on performance with that on expenditure. More recently, a national report of health expenditure by disease groupings excluded expenditure on public health because this was not available 'by disease' 19 -further highlighting the inadequacy of current systems for capturing information about public health activities.