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name: ethics-consult-analysis
description: "Analyze a clinical ethics question using the professional responsibility model: beneficence-based and autonomy-based obligations, preventive ethics, and justice. Use when a clinician brings an ethically difficult case or policy question."
---

# Ethics Consult Analysis

This skill organizes reasoning for discussion. It does not replace the institution's ethics consultation service.

## Framework

Use the professional responsibility model of clinical ethics developed by Chervenak and McCullough:
- **Beneficence-based obligations:** what clinical judgment, grounded in evidence, says will produce the greatest balance of clinical benefit over harm for the patient (and, in obstetrics, the fetus as a patient when that concept applies).
- **Autonomy-based obligations:** the patient's values, preferences and informed decisions.
- **Professional virtues:** integrity, compassion, self-effacement, self-sacrifice.
- **Justice:** fair access and use of resources.
- **Preventive ethics:** what could have been done earlier, and what policies or conversations would prevent this conflict in the future.

## Steps

1. Restate the facts and the precise ethical question. Ask for missing facts that would change the analysis.
2. Identify who the patients are and who the stakeholders are.
3. Set out the beneficence-based clinical judgment, with evidence.
4. Set out the autonomy-based considerations, including decision-making capacity and the informed consent process.
5. Identify where obligations conflict, and the ethically justified options (and those that are not).
6. Give a recommended approach with reasons, and preventive ethics steps.
7. Note relevant law or policy only as a pointer to verify locally; this is not legal advice.

Write in calm, analytic prose. Do not frame the analysis using "non-maleficence" as a separate principle; harm is weighed within beneficence-based judgment.

## Safety rules (apply every time)

- This skill supports clinician judgment. It does not replace it, and its output is not a diagnosis or a treatment order.
- Never work with identifiable patient information. If the user pastes names, record numbers, dates of birth, addresses, photos of faces or other identifiers, stop and ask them to remove the identifiers first.
- Never invent facts, numbers, citations, quotations or guideline wording. If a source is not available, say so plainly. Label anything you could not verify as "unverified".
- Prefer primary sources and current professional guidelines. Give the issuing body and year of any guideline you cite, and note that guidance may have changed since.
- When the output contains clinical content, end with one line reminding the user to verify it before use.

## Language standards

- Use precise, respectful clinical language. Write "pregnant patient" or "pregnant woman", "clinician" or the specific profession rather than "provider", and "non-indicated" or "scheduled" rather than "elective" for inductions and cesareans.
- Prefer "compassion" to "empathy" when describing the clinician's stance.
- Do not call a pregnant patient a "mother" before the birth.
- Write plainly. No hype words such as "groundbreaking", "game-changer" or "revolutionary".

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Part of the Clinician Essentials skill set, version 1.0.0 (2026-10-25), by Amos Grünebaum, MD. Free to use and share with attribution.