Takeaway
When the path is gray, reach out to your ethics committee for perspective. They help clarify options and provide guidance, which can improve communication with patients, families, and colleagues.
Lifelong Learning in Clinical Excellence | October 7, 2025 | 2 min read
By Miriam Quinlan MD, MPH & Mark Hughes MD, MA, Johns Hopkins Medicine
In the fast-paced world of medicine, decisions often arrive with urgency, and clinicians often carry the heavy weight of responsibility. When the path ahead is tangled with competing values of patient autonomy, family wishes, resource limits, and professional duty, it’s difficult to discern what the next steps should be. It can sometimes also feel that there must somehow be a single “correct” answer waiting to be found, perhaps by consulting the ethics committee. But the ethics committee isn’t a judge’s bench. Instead, it is a circle of support.
A circle of support
Its power is quiet, yet profound: it offers perspective, not prescription. The committee invites clinicians to step back from the immediate dilemma and consider the broader human, cultural, and moral dimensions of care. At our institution, it brings together a chorus of disciplines and experiences, voices that can help a clinician see beyond the walls of the patient’s room or the language written in a patient chart.
The greatest strength of an ethics committee isn’t in solving problems for others, but in helping doctors rediscover the clarity and courage to solve them themselves and help them cope with moral distress and promote resilience. By guiding, rather than dictating, the ethics committee ensures that decisions remain both ethically grounded and personally owned. In this way, they safeguard not only care teams, patients, and families, but also the moral resilience of the clinicians who serve them.
In medicine, decisions rarely come in neat packages. Doctors are asked to weigh life, dignity, autonomy, and suffering, often under immense pressure and with no clear “right” answer in sight. In these moments, the ethics committee steps in, not as an authority to declare what must be done, but as a guide to help clinicians navigate the gray.
The power of the ethics committee lies in its restraint. It doesn’t dictate choices; it creates a space where values can be examined, and perspectives shared. Sitting around the table, or virtual table, are people from varied disciplines, medicine, nursing, social work, chaplaincy, law, and the community, each carrying a lens that broadens the view. Together, the role of ethics consultants is to help clinicians see not just the clinical facts, but the human stories woven through them.
It isn’t about outsourcing moral responsibility. Quite the opposite. By clarifying options, surfacing conflicts, and holding space for honest reflection, the committee helps doctors own their decisions more fully. Its role is to advise, not command. To steady and not steer.
The ethics committee reminds us that medicine is as much about wisdom as it is about knowledge. Its gift is not in delivering the answers, but in helping caregivers and care teams find clarity, courage, and compassion in the choices only they can make.
By offering perspective rather than prescription, the ethics committee improves patient care: with moral clarity and ownership restored, clinicians may communicate more openly, act decisively, and deliver care that is both ethically grounded and deeply compassionate.
This piece expresses the views solely of the author. It does not necessarily represent the views of any organization, including Johns Hopkins Medicine.