The Performance Diagnostic Checklist‐Human Services: A brief review

Wilder et al. (2020) pulled together every study that used the PDC-HS.

The PDC-HS is a 20-item checklist supervisors fill out when staff are not doing their jobs right.

They looked at group homes, clinics, and schools to see how the tool helped find the real reason for poor work.

The checklist usually points to one of four causes: training, resources, motivation, or the task itself.

Most teams finished it in under 15 minutes and then picked an intervention that actually worked.

Studies showed staff performance jumped 30-70 percent after using the checklist to choose the fix.

Katz et al. (2003) built a similar tool called the PDDBI for kids with autism. Both use quick caregiver ratings to pick the next step.

Lerman (2024) shows how to hand these tools to non-behavioral staff. The PDC-HS is already doing that in human-service settings.

Falcomata et al. (2012) and Black et al. (2019) both found staff lack training. The PDC-HS fills that gap by telling supervisors exactly what to train.

If your staff skip data sheets, arrive late, or forget safety steps, run the PDC-HS first. It tells you whether to retrain, add tools, give feedback, or change the task. You save hours of guessing and see faster gains in client care.

The Performance Diagnostic Checklist-Human Services (PDC-HS) is an informant-based, or indirect, assessment tool designed to identify the variables that contribute to poor employee performance in human-service settings such as clinics, schools, and residential facilities. It was developed by Carr and colleagues in 2013 as a human-services adaptation of the original Performance Diagnostic Checklist.

A supervisor or manager completes the checklist, usually through a guided interview, to figure out why a performance problem is happening. Rather than assuming the fix is more training, the PDC-HS helps a behavior analyst locate the environmental cause and then choose an intervention that targets it directly.

This is the core logic of organizational behavior management: performance problems have identifiable causes, and matching the solution to the cause works better than applying a default fix.

The PDC-HS organizes its questions into four domains. The first is Training, which asks whether staff know how to perform the task and were taught to fluency. The second is Task Clarification and Prompting, which asks whether expectations are clear and whether antecedents and prompts are in place to signal the behavior.

The third domain is Resources, Materials, and Processes, which asks whether staff have the equipment, materials, and workable procedures needed to do the job. The fourth is Performance Consequences, Effort, and Competition, which asks whether the desired performance is reinforced, whether it takes too much effort, and whether competing activities pull staff away.

The pattern of results points to the domain driving the problem. If the checklist flags consequences rather than training, then more training will not help, and an intervention such as feedback or altered consequences is indicated instead.

This brief review summarizes the existing studies on the PDC-HS and offers suggestions for future research. Across that literature, a consistent theme is that interventions indicated by PDC-HS results tend to improve staff performance more than interventions that are not indicated by the assessment. In other words, assessing first and matching the fix to the identified domain outperforms guessing.

For practicing behavior analysts, the takeaway is to treat staff performance problems the way you would treat client behavior: assess the controlling variables before intervening. The PDC-HS gives a structured, repeatable way to do that in about the time it takes to complete a short interview.