Consultation

Podcast 2 — In conversation

Speaker A: I've booked a consultation with the specialist next Tuesday. She wants to go through all the options before deciding anything.

Speaker B: A proper medical consultation — time to go through options rather than a rushed five-minute appointment. That's when consultation adds its real value: the space to deliberate.

Speaker A: The planning application is open for public consultation until the end of the month. Anyone can submit a response.

Speaker B: Statutory public consultation — the mechanism by which affected parties get to formally register views before a decision is made. The quality of the consultation often determines the quality of the decision.

Speaker A: We shouldn't make this call without at least a consultation with legal. It has contract implications.

Speaker B: Even an informal consultation — a quick conversation with someone who knows the relevant area — is still a consultation. The word doesn't always mean a formal scheduled meeting.

Speaker A: People sometimes confuse consultation and advice.

Speaker B: Advice is the guidance itself — the information or recommendation given. A consultation is the meeting or process in which advice is sought and given. You go to a consultation to receive advice. The consultation is the container; the advice is what it contains.

Speaker A: And don't confuse consultation with deliberation. Deliberation is the internal process of weighing options before deciding — it can happen alone. Consultation is specifically the external process of seeking views or advice from others. You deliberate alone; you consult others.

Podcast 3 — Prompt engineering

Speaker B: Scenario one — a medical consultation assistant prompt.

Design a pre-consultation questionnaire system for a GP practice. Before each consultation, patients complete a structured questionnaire covering: presenting complaint in their own words, symptom duration and severity on a scale of 1 to 10, any relevant recent changes in medication or lifestyle, and whether the consultation is a follow-up to a previous appointment. The questionnaire output is formatted as a consultation summary card delivered to the GP before the patient enters the room.

Speaker B: Consultation summary card delivered before the patient enters is the preparation tool that lets the GP make the most of limited consultation time.

Speaker A: Symptom severity on a 1 to 10 scale gives the GP a baseline that can be compared at follow-up consultations to track progress.

Speaker B: Next — a public consultation platform prompt.

Build a public consultation management system for a local authority. The system supports: creating a consultation with a title, description, closing date, and set of structured questions, publishing the consultation to a public portal, accepting consultation responses from members of the public with optional demographic information, analysing consultation responses to identify themes and areas of consensus or strong disagreement, and generating a consultation report summarising findings for the decision-making committee.

Speaker A: Consultation report summarising findings for the committee is the deliverable that closes the loop — the public needs to see that their consultation responses influenced the outcome.

Speaker B: Right. Now a database schema.

Create a PostgreSQL schema for a legal consultation management platform. Tables: clients, consultations, matters, advice_notes, billing. consultations stores client_id, solicitor_id, consultation_date, consultation_type enum in_person, telephone, video, duration_minutes, and matter_id. advice_notes stores consultation_id, advice_summary text, action_items jsonb array of recommended actions, and follow_up_required boolean. billing stores consultation_id, billable_minutes, rate_per_hour, amount_due, and invoice_status enum draft, sent, paid.

Speaker B: Consultation_type enum covering in-person, telephone, and video reflects the post-pandemic reality of legal consultations delivered across multiple channels.

Speaker B: Fourth — a chatbot consultation prompt.

Design an AI-powered initial consultation chatbot for a financial planning service. The chatbot conducts a structured consultation before handover to a human adviser: it collects the client's financial goals, current savings and investments, risk tolerance on a five-point scale, time horizon, and any specific consultation questions they want the adviser to address. The chatbot produces a consultation brief that the adviser reviews before the human consultation begins.

Speaker A: Consultation brief for the adviser before the human consultation is the handover document that prevents the adviser from spending the first half of the meeting gathering information the chatbot already collected.

Speaker B: Fifth — a design system consultation prompt.

Write a consultation process document for introducing a new design system to an organisation. The consultation covers three phases: an initial discovery consultation with engineering leads, product managers, and designers to understand current pain points, a proposal consultation in which the design system team presents three candidate approaches and gathers structured feedback, and a sign-off consultation with senior stakeholders to approve the chosen approach. Document the consultation questions for each phase.

Speaker B: Three-phase consultation — discovery, proposal, sign-off — mirrors the standard governance pattern for major technical decisions in organisations where buy-in from multiple stakeholder groups is required.

Speaker B: Sixth — a full small app.

Build a single-page web app called Consultation Log — a professional advice tracker. User adds consultation entries with: date, expert consulted (name and role), topic of consultation, key advice received, actions to take as a result, and follow-up date if needed. Consultations can be tagged by domain such as legal, medical, financial, or technical. A dashboard shows upcoming follow-ups and a history of consultations per domain. All data in localStorage.

Speaker A: Upcoming follow-up dashboard makes the consultation log an active management tool rather than a passive record — you can see which consultations have open actions.

Speaker B: That's the lesson — consultation is the meeting where knowledge meets need. In medicine, it is the space where symptoms become diagnoses. In governance, it is the mechanism where public voice influences decisions. In professional life, it is the structured conversation that reduces the risk of acting on incomplete information.

Speaker B: Prompt example: