How to run the NHS

In the week when Britain's secretary of state for health invited the public to give its ideas on improving the NHS—as part of the government rush to “modernise” the health service (p 1292)—this week's BMJ has plenty of suggestions—some of them contradictory.

On p 1329 Alain Enthoven suggests first that the government should stop looking for quick fixes. Enthoven, a professor from Stanford Business School, is the man who brought market forces to the NHS by influencing Mrs Thatcher's reforms of the early 1990s. In the first of a series we have commissioned to help the current …