ACE Star Model EBP Change Process form guide

This is a form, not an essay, and the structure is the ACE Star Model's own five points: Discovery, Summary, Translation, Implementation, Evaluation. Each point has its own set of prompts and each prompt is scored, so the document is completed field by field rather than written continuously. The single most useful thing to understand before starting is that the five points are **sequential and dependent** — what you write at Star Point 1 determines what is available at Star Point 5. A topic chosen loosely at Discovery produces a PICOT that cannot be measured, and then an Evaluation section with nothing to report. Most of the difficulty in this form is created in its first two boxes. So do not fill the form in order on a first pass; sketch Star Points 1, 2 and 4 together, check they agree, and only then write the boxes out properly.

Star Point 1 contains a constraint in capitals that is there because it is frequently ignored: the topic **must involve a nursing practice issue**. Not a medical management question, not an organisational policy matter, not a problem whose solution lies entirely with prescribers or administrators. The test is whether nurses can change what they do and thereby change the outcome. Hand hygiene compliance, catheter-associated infection prevention, fall prevention rounding, pressure injury repositioning, discharge teaching, delirium screening — these pass. A question about which antibiotic regimen is superior does not, however clinically important it is, and choosing one there wastes every box that follows. The rationale box is also where you show you applied the test rather than happened to satisfy it, which costs one clause and reads very differently.

Star Point 2 makes a specific demand about the evidence that is easy to under-read. It asks for a systematic review **from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews**, named explicitly, with a complete APA citation — not any systematic review, and not a primary study. Other sources are permitted as supplements, but the Cochrane review is the anchor. So the practical order is: pick a topic, then check that Cochrane has a review on it, and if it does not, change the topic before writing anything else. Discovering at Star Point 2 that your chosen issue has no Cochrane review is a much cheaper problem than discovering it at Star Point 4. It is a five-minute check that determines whether the remaining fourteen fields are answerable at all.

Star Point 3 asks for stakeholders twice, in two different ways, and both prompts have constraints. They must be listed **by title and not by name**, you must include yourself, and there must be no more than five. Then you are asked separately why each was chosen and what the specific nursing role in the change process is. Five is a limit rather than a target and it forces prioritisation: a charge nurse, an infection preventionist, a pharmacist, a unit educator and yourself is a defensible set; a list of twelve departments is not a set of stakeholders, it is a directory. The cost analysis prompt in the same section is one people leave blank, and it wants a type of analysis and who would run it, not a figure. Naming yourself matters more than it sounds, because the form then asks what the nursing role in the change process specifically is, and the two answers have to be consistent.

Star Points 4 and 5 are where a form gets marked down for vagueness, because almost every prompt there asks for something specific and checkable. Permission to run a trial goes through a named group — a shared governance council, a practice committee, a nurse leader. The timeline wants start and end points with steps between them. The measurable outcomes must be derived from your PICOT and must come with a method of measurement, which is where a badly framed PICOT finally becomes visible. And the reporting question at Star Point 5 is asking how, and to whom — which closes the loop back to the stakeholders you named two points earlier. Read the form backwards once before submitting: if Star Point 5 cannot report anything, the problem is almost always the outcome you wrote at Star Point 2 rather than anything in between.