Each month the Academy puts one genuinely contested clinical question to its membership and publishes how doctors actually voted. The point is not to establish truth by majority — it is to show where practice diverges from guidance, and where experienced clinicians disagree with each other.
Why a poll is worth running
Guidelines describe what should happen. Polls describe what does. When a class I recommendation is followed by only two thirds of respondents, that gap is informative: it usually means the evidence base does not match the patient in front of people, or the resource to comply does not exist. Questions are chosen where the literature is unsettled, where a recent trial has shifted opinion, or where regional practice differs sharply.
How it works
One question is posted at the start of the month with a short clinical vignette and three to five options. Voting is open to all registered doctors and takes under a minute. Results are published at month end with a breakdown by grade and by region where numbers allow, alongside a short commentary setting out what the evidence says and where the honest uncertainty lies.
Votes are anonymous. No individual response is published or attributable, and nothing is shared with any third party.
Suggest a question
The best questions come from the membership, usually out of a disagreement on a ward round that nobody could settle. Send yours through contact with a sentence on why it is contested.
Related
If you would rather be tested than surveyed, the Quiz of the Month runs alongside this, and the cardiology MCQ bank has practice questions with worked explanations. For structured teaching cases see interesting cases and case discussion.
Reading the results honestly
A poll of self-selecting respondents is not a survey with a sampling frame, and the results are presented as what they are: the opinion of the doctors who chose to answer. Where the sample is small or skewed towards one region or grade, the commentary says so. We publish the response count with every result, because a fifty-eight per cent majority of forty voters means something quite different from the same majority of four hundred.
Previous questions
Past polls have covered antiplatelet duration after complex PCI, thresholds for intervention in asymptomatic severe aortic stenosis, and whether a troponin-negative chest pain patient needs an inpatient stress test. In each, published practice and reported practice diverged by more than the guideline authors would like.