Intended for healthcare professionals

BMJ Opinion

BMJ Opinion provides comment and opinion written by The BMJ's international community of readers, authors, and editors.

We welcome submissions for consideration. Your article should be clear, compelling, and appeal to our international readership of doctors and other health professionals. The best pieces make a single topical point. They are well argued with new insights. The word limit is 800 words.

BMJ Opinion is read by doctors and healthcare professionals. We bear this in mind when considering whether to accept an article. It has to be about medicine, healthcare, publishing, or an issue that will interest doctors.

References can be included where appropriate. If possible it is best to include the references as a traditional reference list at the end of the piece.

We have to be careful not to libel anyone. Any potentially contentious articles are checked by our lawyer.

If a patient is described in the articles then we need patient consent unless the patient is dead or anonymised. Here is a link to our patient consent form.

Submitting to BMJ Opinion

Once you have written a BMJ Opinion article then please submit it to blogs@bmj.com. We will then accept or reject it, edit it, and upload it online. We also need a short biography of the author to put online with the article so that readers know who you are. It only needs to be a sentence or two long.

Please can you also send your twitter handle if you have one.

Please could you read our policy on competing interests and add the appropriate statement from this document to your manuscript.