The performance-based standards (PbS) movement in juvenile justice has invigorated the field, causing it to look more carefully at conditions of confinement, quality of care, and accountability. From its vague beginnings, PbS is clearer and more systematic, containing concepts and strategies that benefit all standards development efforts. The National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC) should respond by identifying the PbS strengths, applying them to the juvenile health care standards revision process whenever appropriate, and restructuring the presentation of standards so that they are understood by juvenile justice practitioners as performance-based. It is easier for medical and health care experts to explain quality health care standards in a performance-based language than it is for juvenile confinement practitioners to comprehend the subtleties of medicine well enough that they understand why NCCHC standards represent performance-based medicine without using their performance-based language. This paper reviews the history of the performance-based standard movement, presents a checklist or template for measuring how performance-based any given standard might be, and discusses the implications of PbS for juvenile health care standards by NCCHC.
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