Spotlights and letters

This week’s journal includes a new feature, a BMJ Spotlight. It’s modelled on Nature’s Insight supplements, commissioned by the journal’s editors, and sponsored by one or more not-for-profit organisations. We plan to publish four a year, each exploring a topic from a range of angles through a specially commissioned collection of reviews.

Readers helped us choose the topics for our first two Spotlights via a poll we ran in 2008. We asked where improvements to health care would make the greatest difference to patients (www.bmj.com/content/336/7650.toc#MakingaDifference), and palliative care beyond cancer topped the poll. We quickly found sponsors committed to improving this area of health care: the British Heart Foundation and the National Council for Palliative Care. As Tony Delamothe, Mike …