Data sources
Government expenditure on public health activities includes spending:
- by the Australian Government
- by state and territory governments.
The data used in estimating the Australian Government spending are sourced from
- NHR funding and FFAs from Table 3.13 of the Treasury Final Budget Outcome, with updates from the NHFB
- direct spending on public health activities from Department of Health, Disability and Ageing (DHDA) program cost centres
- payments of benefits for cervical screening medical services covered by MBS
- Australian Government capital depreciation: data from ABS Capital Consumption (ETF 1231) allocated into public health activities using proportions calculated from Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
The data used in estimating state and territory government spending are sourced from the Government Health Expenditure National Minimum Dataset (GHE NMDS) gross expenditure table from each state and territory. This expenditure includes capital depreciation. Public health activities include the following function codes
- Communicable disease control (Fnc_401)
- Selected health promotion (Fnc_402)
- Organised immunisation (Fnc_403)
- Environmental health (Fnc_404)
- Food standards and hygiene (Fnc_405)
- Breast cancer screening (Fnc_406)
- Cervical screening (Fnc_407)
- Bowel screening (Fnc_408)
- Prevention of hazardous and harmful drug use (Fnc_409)
- Public health research (Fnc_410)
- Public health n.f.d (Fnc_499)
Estimated government expenditure on public health activities in the report was higher than the government public health spending in Health expenditure Australia 2023–24 (HEA report) because of the inclusion of expenditure on the following:
- payments of benefits for cervical screening medical services covered by MBS which was allocated into unreferred medical services area of spending in the HEA report.
- Public health research spending (Fnc_410) by state and territory governments which was allocated into health research in the HEA report.