Policy readiness for climate-resilient primary health care: An integrative review of Ghana’s Community-Based Health Planning and Services policy using World Health Organisation benchmarks

Objective This paper examines how Ghana’s Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) policy supports climate action, using the WHO guidance for Climate Resilient and Environmentally Sustainable Healthcare Facilities as the benchmark. Methods READ (Ready your materials, Extract data, Analyse data, and Distil findings) approach, utilising thematic analysis to extract deductive codes and keywords from the WHO guidance for Climate Resilience and Environmentally Sustainable Healthcare Facilities. Subsequently, we employed keywords-in-context using extracted keywords to evaluate the CHPS policy readiness for climate action. Results Ghansa's MOH did not adequately mainstream climate action directives into the CHPS policy despite a favourable policy environment and the availability of tools. The CHPS policy, as a stand-alone policy, minimally mainstreamed WHO recommendations across components of the Health workforce, water, sanitation, hygiene, and health care waste, energy and Infrastructure, technology, products, and processes. Conclusion Climate action was not sufficiently mainstreamed into the CHPS policy, despite a supportive policy environment. The limited mainstreaming of climate action into the CHPS policy poses challenges for climate action within its operations. We recommend that future reviews of the CHPS policy fully mainstream climate considerations, with an in-built accountability mechanism. Additionally, we recommend that future studies review the totality of health system policies to provide deeper insights.