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The government is working at improving on the implementation of the Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) system as a presidential strategy for achieving universal health coverage in the country. It is, therefore, working at fine-tuning the current CHPS policy for a uniformed implementation in the country. To this end, a two-day National Technical Forum on CHPS has taken place at Sogokope in the Volta Region. The Minister of Health, Dr Kwaku Agyemang-Mensah, in a keynote address on Tuesday, said the forum provided an opportunity to examine some of the conceptual and contradictory questions and find workable solutions where possible. He said there were a number of written manuals, plans and strategies that were contradictory in many ways with agencies of the Ministry of Health (MoH), various development partners, individual philanthropists and district assemblies, applying them in various forms as they deemed fit. �Don�t get me wrong. They all mean well in supporting access to services but with less clear guidelines�, he added. Dr Agyemang-Mensah said as a country it had been accepted that services delivered close to clients through community participation and leadership were a sustainable framework and called on all stakeholders to let that be a guiding principle for any future design. He said the terms of reference for the technical forum were for them to come out with concepts within the basic principles of primary healthcare and universal health coverage. �In this context, we need to bridge the gap between CHPS and social health insurance in our future implementation�, he said. A Presidential Staffer, Mrs Emelia Arthur, who chaired the opening of the forum, said the government was committed to ensuring that the CHPS compound programme became a success. She said the government�s commitment to cut their salaries by 10 per cent to support health care delivery was going to help increase the number of CHPS compounds. The National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) Vice Chairperson, Mrs Edith Tetteh, said there was the need to scale-up the CHPS programme to achieve health for all. The Director, Policy, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PPME) of the MoH, Dr Afisah Zakariah, in a presentation on the synthesis of previous CHPS reviews and recommendations, said there was the need to redefine the CHPS Policy and Strategy within the new decentralisation framework and place the stewardship with district assemblies. She said findings on the CHPs policy showed that there was poor understanding of the CHPS policy at all levels She, therefore, called for a re-examination of the minimum package of interventions and standardise it across the board. Dr Afisah also said to help the CHPS programme thrive, there was the need to develop a structured in-service system and career-development pathway for community health officers (CHOs) who were in-charge of the CHPS compounds.