Beaches can be important health promoting settings. However, the quality of beaches may differ across neighbourhoods, and by neighbourhood socioeconomic. This may mean that not everyone has equal access to potential health and wellbeing benefits beaches can provide. More robust measurement of beach quality and the relationship with physical activity could provide information around what features are health and wellbeing promoting. This study modified and evaluated the reliability of the UK Blue Health Environmental Assessment Tool (BEAT) in an Australian context. The BEAT tool assesses the health enhancing features and activities taking place in blue spaces.
Australian beaches could be important settings for health promotion, due to the physical activity people do in and around these spaces. Overall, a modified version of the UK-based BEAT provided reliable measures of the attributes of beaches in an Australian context. Further research using the modified BEAT is needed to examine the relationship between attributes of beaches, socioeconomic status and health, to inform recommendations on how to protect and potentially improve modifiable attributes of these spaces.