Although clinical ethics support services are becoming increasingly prevalent in Europe and North America, they remain
an uncommon feature of the Irish healthcare system and Irish health professionals lack formal support when faced with
ethically challenging cases.We have developed a variant on existing clinical ethics decision-making tools which is designed
to build capacity and confidence amongst Irish practitioners and enable them to confront challenging situations in the
absence of any dedicated support structure. The tool provided below follows a transparent stepwise procedure which
avoids an overcomplicated analysis while remaining sensitive to the complexity of the issues addressed. The novelty of
the tool lies in the explicit association it makes between each step in the process and one or more responsibilities based
on established norms of ethical decision-making in the public domain.