Dr. Patience Ami Mamattah is a distinguished public health leader and healthcare administrator with over 25 years of experience in health systems management, public health policy, research, and service delivery. She currently serves as the Municipal Director of Health Services for the Ningo Prampram Municipality under the Ghana Health Service. Dr. Mamattah holds master's degrees in Public Administration and Applied Health Social Sciences and is a PhD candidate in Health Policy, Planning and Management at the University of Ghana. She has led several nationally and internationally funded public health initiatives, secured competitive research grants, and received multiple awards for excellence in leadership and public health. Her work focuses on strengthening health systems, promoting evidence-based practice, and improving health outcomes through innovation, collaboration, and community engagement.  

We need all the resources to be able to implement health policy”; exploring multisectoral collaboration for population health improvement in an urban municipality in Ghana. Background Rapid, uncontrolled urbanisation is a global phenomenon most especially for most Low-and Middle Income Countries like Ghana.  This situation presents several challenges to population health among which are slums, poor environmental health and sanitation, disease outbreaks, communicable and non communicable diseases and mortalities. To address these challenges and to improve overall population health; all stakeholders must deliberately engage through multisectoral collaboration. There is however lack of evidence on influence of governance on multisectoral collaboration and its subsequent impact on population health improvement in Ghana. Objective The study aimed to explore multisectoral collaboration for population health improvement in an urban setting, Ashaiman Municipality in Ghana.  Methodology The study employed qualitative study design using document/desk review, key informant interviews and stakeholder workshop methods for data collection. Fifty (50) different documents were reviewed to glean ideas about multisectoral-related themes. Purposive sampling method was applied to recruit twenty (20) study participants as key informants whilst twenty-seven participants were recruited for stakeholders’ workshop to validate earlier findings. Thematic analysis was used in analysing data with emerging themes from the interview transcripts forming the basis of this study’s findings.  The findings were explained using theoretical triangulation consisting of multisectoral collaboration, governance, leadership, and Health in All Policies (HiAPs) perspectives.   Findings The study identified the key factors influencing multisectoral collaboration with a rippling effect on population health improvement, including inadequate understanding of multisectoral collaboration, apparent lack of essential technical and leadership capacity, perceived corruption, politicisation and political party interference of the governance arrangements. The study also identified a high sense of accountability as a contributory factor to encourage multisectoral collaboration.  Other factors included a seeming lack of transparency, disjointed, parallel, non-harmonised policies and policy incongruence.  Most importantly, there was apparent lack of essential resources, including funds for enhancing multisectoral collaborative activities in this urban setting.    Conclusion This study highlights a perceived weak multisectoral collaboration for population health improvement in the Ashaiman Municipality.  The study recommends the need for stakeholders’ engagement, awareness creation and capacity building, tackling corruption, and ensuring leadership commitment to improving multisectoral collaboration.  There is also a need to develop a Health in All Policies (HiAP)based monitoring framework to periodically assess stakeholders’ contributions to population health improvement. This has the propensity to foster a change process where all stakeholders will have to deliberately mainstream health into all their policy decisions and interventions.