Popular at-home fetal monitors linked to stillbirths, newborn deaths
The most recent death was on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) said.
The sale of handheld fetal heart monitors – also known as portable fetal dopplers – was banned in Australia in September 2024 after a TGA review confirmed the devices were 'falsely reassuring' pregnant women that their distressed unborn babies had healthy heartbeats, leading to delays in seeking medical attention and death.
But retailers have continued to sell the popular, though illegal, devices to would-be Australian parents.
'[W]e are aware of devices being sold illegally through online platforms,' the TGA said in a statement, adding: 'There are no home-use [fetal] dopplers approved for supply in Australia by the TGA.'
People who use the devices without specialised training can easily mistake the sounds of the mother's blood flow or the placenta as a fetal heartbeat, providing potentially inaccurate reassurance, obstetricians and midwives have warned.
'Using a home-use [fetal] heart monitor to check a baby's heartbeat may seem reassuring, but it can be dangerously misleading,' the TGA's alert read.
There have also been cases where parents could not find a fetal heartbeat using the devices, causing unnecessary panic, the TGA said.
A Google search for fetal monitors returns dozens of hits for portable dopplers for sale, including several Australian-based retailers, potentially attracting criminal and civil penalties.
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Sydney Morning Herald
30 minutes ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Treated like a hysterical mother': Assaulted by her son, Alison's pain was ignored until she collapsed
Alison Beatty's adult son was in the midst of a 48-hour schizophrenic episode when he threw her against the wall of their family home. When she next went to the bathroom she noticed blood in her urine, so immediately took herself to Katoomba Hospital's emergency department. There, she was treated by a young male doctor who suspected a broken rib and sent her home without completing tests that would have discovered the internal injuries. 'The doctor basically sighed and looked up and said, 'Well, blood in your urine is common for women your age',' Beatty, then aged 59, said. She went home and that night had dinner at a restaurant for her birthday. Her symptoms worsened – she developed pain in her shoulder and found it hard to breathe. Her friend and qualified nurse Jennifer Douglas was present and insisted she return to emergency that night. 'Alison is a stoic lady, she's not a complainer,' Douglas said. 'You could see she was really trying to enjoy the occasion, to put aside the pain, but I could tell she wasn't right.' They went to the same emergency room and were again dismissed. No pain medication was issued nor tests performed – until Beatty collapsed. 'She actually started going into shock,' Douglas said. 'All of a sudden they thought, 'we better do something here'.' Loading Beatty was intubated, put on life support and rushed in a critical condition by ambulance to Penrith Hospital. An ultrasound finally revealed the assault injury had caused her lungs to fill with blood. 'By then, because it had been so long, the blood had coagulated; I had to have a long operation where they removed all the blood,' Beatty said. 'I was in intensive care for a long time. The surgeon said, 'you're very lucky to have survived'. I sat on this for some time but I was angry about it.' After she recovered she complained to the hospital about how she was treated. 'When they looked at the notes, he'd written down: 'Mother has trouble controlling her child', as if I'd had a young child with a tantrum,' she said. 'I felt like I was being treated like a hysterical mother, or not knowing what I was talking about. Most of what I said wasn't heard. 'If someone's got blood in the urine, you don't just dismiss it as their age,' she said. 'They later apologised and said, 'we failed you'.' At the very least, Douglas said emergency doctors should have ordered an X-ray, which would have quickly revealed the problem. The near-death incident occurred in 2014 but, more than a decade on, both women are still furious and are speaking up to stop others suffering the same fate. 'They didn't listen. They did not take a proper history. It was appalling,' Douglas said. 'I'm just so glad I was there, otherwise she wouldn't have been here today.' Beatty was one of more than 2000 women who participated in a survey by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald documenting experiences as part of an investigation into medical misogyny in Australian healthcare. More than 300 of the respondents described experiences of the gender bias in emergency departments, where diagnostic decisions in busy hospitals can have life-and-death consequences. The investigation into medical misogyny has previously revealed disturbing cases of this bias right across the healthcare system, including women being incorrectly admitted to mental health wards or cancer diagnoses being missed. The women, doctors and experts who are speaking out are not seeking to lay blame at the feet of clinicians but to lay bare entrenched, structural problems disadvantaging women in a health system that historically evolved to reflect the needs of men. Dr Clare Skinner, a Sydney-based emergency physician, said the gender bias is baked into the medical canon, particularly with how pain is treated in men and women. 'For women, we're too quick to leap to say, 'that's not serious',' she said. 'If a man says they have pain they're taken seriously … There's the idea that women are more likely to overstate their pain. 'This all plays out along gender lines but also intersectional lines,' she said, explaining women of colour experience greater discrimination. However, Skinner, who is president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said enormous work has been done over the past decade, including the introduction of specific training to recognise and address bias. 'I am proud that my specialty has really taken on this notion that we work in an environment where quick judgments are necessary and we have to actually train to make sure our quick judgments are the best, least-biased ones possible.' Delays, dismissed In emergency departments, doctors must make quick diagnostic decisions based on little information and rely on guidelines in the triage system for how to prioritise urgency. Studies have shown throughout history that women who present to emergency departments are less likely to be given pain medication, or experience delays in receiving it, compared with men. One American study from 2008 found women who presented with abdominal pain at emergency departments with similar pain levels as men were up to 11 per cent less likely to be given pain medication. More recently, similar results were published in a 2023 study by Australasian Emergency Care, which looked at a cohort of patients presenting similar levels of abdominal pain and found 14.5 per cent of women were given pain medication versus 26 per cent of men. The same study found the average time from presenting to the emergency department and receiving pain relief was 80 minutes for men, compared with 94 minutes for women. MEDICAL MISOGYNY: A CALL TO ACTION The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age last year launched an investigation into medical misogyny: ingrained, systemic sexism across Australia's healthcare system, medical research and practice. More than 2000 women shared their experiences as part of our crowd-sourced investigative series, which prompted a national outpouring of grief and frustration as women described feeling gaslit, dismissed or being told their pain was 'all in their heads'. We call on the federal government to boost Medicare funding for GP appointments that last more than 20 minutes to improve care for women and others with complex health conditions. The Albanese government and the Coalition have promised to pour $8.5 billion into Medicare to make GP visits more affordable and improve bulk-billing rates, but longer, 20-minute appointments will receive a smaller proportional funding increase. Doctors have warned that these policies could further disadvantage women by continuing to incentivise shorter consultations, which don't give GPs enough time to address menopause, pelvic pain and other women's health issues. The Australasian Triage Scale (ATS) is a clinical tool used by emergency doctors and nurses to sort patients into five categories, from Category 1, which means life-threatening and requiring immediate care, to Category 5, which is non-urgent and where patients can wait up to 120 minutes. In July, registered nurse Amanda Dumesny posted on LinkedIn the ATS recommends initial decisions have to be made within two or three minutes. However, Dumesny said there is 'growing concern' that training to prioritise care on clinical urgency 'may inadvertently perpetuate gender biases'. 'These biases result in men's symptoms being more frequently classified as urgent, while women's symptoms, even when potentially more serious, are downplayed,' she wrote. 'Although the ATS update in 2024 appears intended to address certain biases by clarifying triage protocols for historically under-triaged cohorts, such as pregnant women, the elderly, paediatric patients, First Nations people, and those experiencing mental health crises, it stops short of recognising that systemic gender bias is rooted in how symptoms are assessed and determined as being more or less critical.' She wrote there needed to be 'systemic changes and focused education' to improve gender bias in the ATS and ensure all patients receive equitable care. Sydney-based Kate Vinen believes her own delays in receiving pain medication and an accurate diagnosis were driven by medical misogyny in the triage system. In her 20s, about 12 years ago, she presented to emergency with irregular periods but said male doctors sent her away without any investigation. She pushed for tests to be completed and eventually, years later, it was discovered she had uterine cancer. 'By the time I got a diagnosis it was too late. I had to have my uterus removed and lost my ability to have children. It felt like being let down by the system but I was too young,' Vinen said. 'I was dismissed over a period of time, not just once but a handful of times, to get answers for why I wasn't getting regular periods. They couldn't find an easy answer. I was dismissed. The problem got bigger over time and resulted in when I was finally diagnosed by a woman with uterine cancer.' Vinen had a hysterectomy and went into remission but even since then she has found doctors are quick to label her concerns as gynaecological. 'It sounds terrible but it's helpful in a way that now I don't have ovaries or a uterus,' she said. In 2014 she went to the emergency department at a major Sydney hospital with a throbbing pain in her shoulder, vomiting and loss of consciousness. The doctors completed an internal vaginal examination. 'I knew it wasn't in that area. I was so out of [it] that I let them do it. But I clearly articulated my main symptom – excruciating pain in my left shoulder,' she said. 'They went straight to gynaecological.' 'I was projectile vomiting from how much pain I was in. My friend said it looked like a scene from The Exorcist.' Kate Vinen Vinen was first diagnosed with a burst cyst, and says every time she told the doctors the pain was in her shoulder she was dismissed. 'I knew it wasn't that kind of pain,' she said. Eventually, doctors discovered Vinen's spleen had ruptured – one of the most common symptoms being shoulder pain. 'I was projectile vomiting from how much pain I was in. They hadn't given me any serious pain medication. My friend said it looked like a scene from The Exorcist,' she said. 'An earlier diagnosis would have meant faster and bigger pain treatment.' 'Traumatic, awful' Over interviews with women who responded to this investigation's survey, several described presenting to hospital emergency departments with abdominal pain – which was treated as gynaecological when the problem was gastrointestinal. One woman described presenting to emergency with severe and escalating abdominal pain, which was first diagnosed as an ovarian cyst. 'I'd had an ovarian cyst before but this was different,' she said. 'I was screaming at the top of my lungs.' It turned out the woman's bowel had twisted and turned necrotic – resulting in surgery to remove 20 centimetres of bowel. 'As time went on, the tissue was expanding, literally blowing up inside of me,' she said. 'Had it been diagnosed earlier, it's likely that I wouldn't have had to have that removed.' Another woman was discharged from hospital after her second C-section birth and experienced pain she had never experienced before, describing it as 'red-hot, like I was being burned with a poker'. She presented at the emergency department with excruciating pain but was sent home and told to take more painkillers. Five weeks later she presented again, and this time was rushed to emergency surgery. As it transpired, her wounds had broken down internally and caused her bowels to start dying. 'I probably would have died if I hadn't had emergency surgery that day,' she said. 'It was pretty traumatic and awful. It was dismissive of someone presenting in pain who knows their own body.' Loading Emergency physician and federal AMA Emergency Medicine representative Dr Sarah Whitelaw agreed evidence shows that medical misogyny is impacting decisions in emergency departments. 'It's now well-known that women have different symptoms to men in some cases,' she said, particularly heart attacks. 'As a woman you're less likely to be recognised in terms of the need for urgent care, which means you take longer to be seen … and it will take longer to get you the treatment that's needed. 'We know, in the emergency department, women are often given a lower pain rating, and it takes us longer to get them effective pain relief, and we don't often give them as much pain relief as we do with men describing similar pain levels.' Whitelaw said these issues were compounded by overcrowding and understaffing across the healthcare system, which puts pressure on the time that emergency workers can spend with patients. She stressed the entire healthcare system, not just emergency wards, needed to be reviewed to find solutions to the problems – including greater Medicare rebates for GP clinics and other wraparound services. 'We've incentivised really short, high-volume numbers of patients that they see every day, instead of rewarding the time that's often needed, particularly for women's health [issues] that are particularly complicated,' Whitelaw said. Back in the Blue Mountains, Beatty agrees. Under the normal procedures, Beatty said the emergency ward should have alerted the police or social worker after the mental health system failed to take her calls for help with her son seriously in the lead-up to the assault. This would have prevented the cascading medical failures, she said. 'Katoomba is an underfunded, small hospital,' she said. 'But I think it's important to point out for the sake of the medical fraternity, and for other women, how these sometimes fatal mistakes can occur.' A spokesperson for the Nepean Blue Mountains Local Health District said, 'we sincerely apologise' to Beatty, and pledged to deliver 'respectful, evidence-based and equitable care'. A spokesperson for NSW Health said healthcare workers are trained to 'address unconscious bias to ensure all patients have equitable access to healthcare' and pointed to the investment of 'half a billion dollars' into emergency departments. 'We acknowledge more work can always be done to tackle health inequalities.'
The Age
30 minutes ago
- The Age
‘Treated like a hysterical mother': Assaulted by her son, Alison's pain was ignored until she collapsed
Alison Beatty's adult son was in the midst of a 48-hour schizophrenic episode when he threw her against the wall of their family home. When she next went to the bathroom she noticed blood in her urine, so immediately took herself to Katoomba Hospital's emergency department. There, she was treated by a young male doctor who suspected a broken rib and sent her home without completing tests that would have discovered the internal injuries. 'The doctor basically sighed and looked up and said, 'Well, blood in your urine is common for women your age',' Beatty, then aged 59, said. She went home and that night had dinner at a restaurant for her birthday. Her symptoms worsened – she developed pain in her shoulder and found it hard to breathe. Her friend and qualified nurse Jennifer Douglas was present and insisted she return to emergency that night. 'Alison is a stoic lady, she's not a complainer,' Douglas said. 'You could see she was really trying to enjoy the occasion, to put aside the pain, but I could tell she wasn't right.' They went to the same emergency room and were again dismissed. No pain medication was issued nor tests performed – until Beatty collapsed. 'She actually started going into shock,' Douglas said. 'All of a sudden they thought, 'we better do something here'.' Loading Beatty was intubated, put on life support and rushed in a critical condition by ambulance to Penrith Hospital. An ultrasound finally revealed the assault injury had caused her lungs to fill with blood. 'By then, because it had been so long, the blood had coagulated; I had to have a long operation where they removed all the blood,' Beatty said. 'I was in intensive care for a long time. The surgeon said, 'you're very lucky to have survived'. I sat on this for some time but I was angry about it.' After she recovered she complained to the hospital about how she was treated. 'When they looked at the notes, he'd written down: 'Mother has trouble controlling her child', as if I'd had a young child with a tantrum,' she said. 'I felt like I was being treated like a hysterical mother, or not knowing what I was talking about. Most of what I said wasn't heard. 'If someone's got blood in the urine, you don't just dismiss it as their age,' she said. 'They later apologised and said, 'we failed you'.' At the very least, Douglas said emergency doctors should have ordered an X-ray, which would have quickly revealed the problem. The near-death incident occurred in 2014 but, more than a decade on, both women are still furious and are speaking up to stop others suffering the same fate. 'They didn't listen. They did not take a proper history. It was appalling,' Douglas said. 'I'm just so glad I was there, otherwise she wouldn't have been here today.' Beatty was one of more than 2000 women who participated in a survey by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald documenting experiences as part of an investigation into medical misogyny in Australian healthcare. More than 300 of the respondents described experiences of the gender bias in emergency departments, where diagnostic decisions in busy hospitals can have life-and-death consequences. The investigation into medical misogyny has previously revealed disturbing cases of this bias right across the healthcare system, including women being incorrectly admitted to mental health wards or cancer diagnoses being missed. The women, doctors and experts who are speaking out are not seeking to lay blame at the feet of clinicians but to lay bare entrenched, structural problems disadvantaging women in a health system that historically evolved to reflect the needs of men. Dr Clare Skinner, a Sydney-based emergency physician, said the gender bias is baked into the medical canon, particularly with how pain is treated in men and women. 'For women, we're too quick to leap to say, 'that's not serious',' she said. 'If a man says they have pain they're taken seriously … There's the idea that women are more likely to overstate their pain. 'This all plays out along gender lines but also intersectional lines,' she said, explaining women of colour experience greater discrimination. However, Skinner, who is president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said enormous work has been done over the past decade, including the introduction of specific training to recognise and address bias. 'I am proud that my specialty has really taken on this notion that we work in an environment where quick judgments are necessary and we have to actually train to make sure our quick judgments are the best, least-biased ones possible.' Delays, dismissed In emergency departments, doctors must make quick diagnostic decisions based on little information and rely on guidelines in the triage system for how to prioritise urgency. Studies have shown throughout history that women who present to emergency departments are less likely to be given pain medication, or experience delays in receiving it, compared with men. One American study from 2008 found women who presented with abdominal pain at emergency departments with similar pain levels as men were up to 11 per cent less likely to be given pain medication. More recently, similar results were published in a 2023 study by Australasian Emergency Care, which looked at a cohort of patients presenting similar levels of abdominal pain and found 14.5 per cent of women were given pain medication versus 26 per cent of men. The same study found the average time from presenting to the emergency department and receiving pain relief was 80 minutes for men, compared with 94 minutes for women. MEDICAL MISOGYNY: A CALL TO ACTION The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age last year launched an investigation into medical misogyny: ingrained, systemic sexism across Australia's healthcare system, medical research and practice. More than 2000 women shared their experiences as part of our crowd-sourced investigative series, which prompted a national outpouring of grief and frustration as women described feeling gaslit, dismissed or being told their pain was 'all in their heads'. We call on the federal government to boost Medicare funding for GP appointments that last more than 20 minutes to improve care for women and others with complex health conditions. The Albanese government and the Coalition have promised to pour $8.5 billion into Medicare to make GP visits more affordable and improve bulk-billing rates, but longer, 20-minute appointments will receive a smaller proportional funding increase. Doctors have warned that these policies could further disadvantage women by continuing to incentivise shorter consultations, which don't give GPs enough time to address menopause, pelvic pain and other women's health issues. The Australasian Triage Scale (ATS) is a clinical tool used by emergency doctors and nurses to sort patients into five categories, from Category 1, which means life-threatening and requiring immediate care, to Category 5, which is non-urgent and where patients can wait up to 120 minutes. In July, registered nurse Amanda Dumesny posted on LinkedIn the ATS recommends initial decisions have to be made within two or three minutes. However, Dumesny said there is 'growing concern' that training to prioritise care on clinical urgency 'may inadvertently perpetuate gender biases'. 'These biases result in men's symptoms being more frequently classified as urgent, while women's symptoms, even when potentially more serious, are downplayed,' she wrote. 'Although the ATS update in 2024 appears intended to address certain biases by clarifying triage protocols for historically under-triaged cohorts, such as pregnant women, the elderly, paediatric patients, First Nations people, and those experiencing mental health crises, it stops short of recognising that systemic gender bias is rooted in how symptoms are assessed and determined as being more or less critical.' She wrote there needed to be 'systemic changes and focused education' to improve gender bias in the ATS and ensure all patients receive equitable care. Sydney-based Kate Vinen believes her own delays in receiving pain medication and an accurate diagnosis were driven by medical misogyny in the triage system. In her 20s, about 12 years ago, she presented to emergency with irregular periods but said male doctors sent her away without any investigation. She pushed for tests to be completed and eventually, years later, it was discovered she had uterine cancer. 'By the time I got a diagnosis it was too late. I had to have my uterus removed and lost my ability to have children. It felt like being let down by the system but I was too young,' Vinen said. 'I was dismissed over a period of time, not just once but a handful of times, to get answers for why I wasn't getting regular periods. They couldn't find an easy answer. I was dismissed. The problem got bigger over time and resulted in when I was finally diagnosed by a woman with uterine cancer.' Vinen had a hysterectomy and went into remission but even since then she has found doctors are quick to label her concerns as gynaecological. 'It sounds terrible but it's helpful in a way that now I don't have ovaries or a uterus,' she said. In 2014 she went to the emergency department at a major Sydney hospital with a throbbing pain in her shoulder, vomiting and loss of consciousness. The doctors completed an internal vaginal examination. 'I knew it wasn't in that area. I was so out of [it] that I let them do it. But I clearly articulated my main symptom – excruciating pain in my left shoulder,' she said. 'They went straight to gynaecological.' 'I was projectile vomiting from how much pain I was in. My friend said it looked like a scene from The Exorcist.' Kate Vinen Vinen was first diagnosed with a burst cyst, and says every time she told the doctors the pain was in her shoulder she was dismissed. 'I knew it wasn't that kind of pain,' she said. Eventually, doctors discovered Vinen's spleen had ruptured – one of the most common symptoms being shoulder pain. 'I was projectile vomiting from how much pain I was in. They hadn't given me any serious pain medication. My friend said it looked like a scene from The Exorcist,' she said. 'An earlier diagnosis would have meant faster and bigger pain treatment.' 'Traumatic, awful' Over interviews with women who responded to this investigation's survey, several described presenting to hospital emergency departments with abdominal pain – which was treated as gynaecological when the problem was gastrointestinal. One woman described presenting to emergency with severe and escalating abdominal pain, which was first diagnosed as an ovarian cyst. 'I'd had an ovarian cyst before but this was different,' she said. 'I was screaming at the top of my lungs.' It turned out the woman's bowel had twisted and turned necrotic – resulting in surgery to remove 20 centimetres of bowel. 'As time went on, the tissue was expanding, literally blowing up inside of me,' she said. 'Had it been diagnosed earlier, it's likely that I wouldn't have had to have that removed.' Another woman was discharged from hospital after her second C-section birth and experienced pain she had never experienced before, describing it as 'red-hot, like I was being burned with a poker'. She presented at the emergency department with excruciating pain but was sent home and told to take more painkillers. Five weeks later she presented again, and this time was rushed to emergency surgery. As it transpired, her wounds had broken down internally and caused her bowels to start dying. 'I probably would have died if I hadn't had emergency surgery that day,' she said. 'It was pretty traumatic and awful. It was dismissive of someone presenting in pain who knows their own body.' Loading Emergency physician and federal AMA Emergency Medicine representative Dr Sarah Whitelaw agreed evidence shows that medical misogyny is impacting decisions in emergency departments. 'It's now well-known that women have different symptoms to men in some cases,' she said, particularly heart attacks. 'As a woman you're less likely to be recognised in terms of the need for urgent care, which means you take longer to be seen … and it will take longer to get you the treatment that's needed. 'We know, in the emergency department, women are often given a lower pain rating, and it takes us longer to get them effective pain relief, and we don't often give them as much pain relief as we do with men describing similar pain levels.' Whitelaw said these issues were compounded by overcrowding and understaffing across the healthcare system, which puts pressure on the time that emergency workers can spend with patients. She stressed the entire healthcare system, not just emergency wards, needed to be reviewed to find solutions to the problems – including greater Medicare rebates for GP clinics and other wraparound services. 'We've incentivised really short, high-volume numbers of patients that they see every day, instead of rewarding the time that's often needed, particularly for women's health [issues] that are particularly complicated,' Whitelaw said. Back in the Blue Mountains, Beatty agrees. Under the normal procedures, Beatty said the emergency ward should have alerted the police or social worker after the mental health system failed to take her calls for help with her son seriously in the lead-up to the assault. This would have prevented the cascading medical failures, she said. 'Katoomba is an underfunded, small hospital,' she said. 'But I think it's important to point out for the sake of the medical fraternity, and for other women, how these sometimes fatal mistakes can occur.' A spokesperson for the Nepean Blue Mountains Local Health District said, 'we sincerely apologise' to Beatty, and pledged to deliver 'respectful, evidence-based and equitable care'. A spokesperson for NSW Health said healthcare workers are trained to 'address unconscious bias to ensure all patients have equitable access to healthcare' and pointed to the investment of 'half a billion dollars' into emergency departments. 'We acknowledge more work can always be done to tackle health inequalities.'
9 News
a day ago
- 9 News
Experts say the Health Star Rating system has failed. This is why
Your web browser is no longer supported. To improve your experience update it here More than 10 years after Health Star Ratings were first introduced, experts say the voluntary system has failed because manufacturers have not been obligated to use it. The system, which was launched in 2014, rates the overall nutritional profile of a packaged food product from 0.5 to 5 stars. Currently just over a third of products (36 per cent) feature a Health Star Rating and, unsurprisingly, it's the 5-star products that are far more likely to feature the rating (61 per cent) compared to only 16 per cent of 0.5-star products. The Health Star Rating is designed to help consumers make healthier choices by comparing similar products. (Getty) "Voluntary uptake has failed," Dr Alexandra Jones, the head of Food Governance at The George Institute for Global Health said. She said because the system was voluntary, it was applied "selectively... often for marketing purposes". "Fundamentally people understand the concept of stars and they can use it to make a better choice," she said. "In the real world their ability to actually use it has been mostly limited by the fact that it's only on a third of products." In 2019, a review of the system found consumers understood the system but it was not on enough labels to adequately compare similar products. The Australian, New Zealand and state and territory governments then set the industry a series of targets in an effort to lift the uptake. The final target, 70 per cent by November 2025, almost certainly will not be met. "Until it's mandatory, people will continue to struggle out there to understand how to make good choices," Dietitians Australia CEO Magriet Raxworthy said. "Australians want easy, transparent nutrition information about the food they are choosing for themselves and their families, and mandating the system will bring more consistency and clarity across the shelves." Jones said Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) had been ordered to start the preparatory work for a mandatory system but she feared the timeline could blow out as far as 2029. Experts say the logo is applied selectively as a marketing tool, rather than health advice for consumers. (iStock) "Now that we've had 10 years of voluntary operation we know a lot about how this system works and where it needs to be improved," she said. "We don't want this to go on any longer than it has to." She said mandatory country of origin labelling, which has seen an uptake of more than 90 per cent in a similar time frame, proved it was possible to implement a mandatory Health Star Rating system quickly. "Rapid food labelling change is definitely possible when it is mandated," she said. A spokesperson from FSANZ confirmed preparatory work to inform future decision-making by food ministers on whether the Health Star Rating system should be mandated was underway. "If the voluntary uptake target (70 per cent of intended products displaying the HSR by 14 November 2025) is not met, FSANZ's preparatory work will enable an efficient process for incorporating the HSR system into the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, should ministers ask FSANZ to consider mandating the system," the spokesperson said. Manufacturers input the nutritional information of their product on a government website, which uses an algorithm to calculate the Health Star Rating of the product. The algorithm gives points for protein, fibre, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes and removes points for saturated fat, sugar and salt. Products are given a rating between 0.5 and 5 stars. The manufacturer can then choose whether to display the rating on their product or not. Consumers ideally then use the rating to compare similar products and ultimately make healthier choices. The rating aligns with the Australian Dietary Guidelines and New Zealand Eating and Activity Guidelines. health Nutrition food Australia New Zealand national CONTACT US
