CIYJ Data Brief
Do Youth Rate Medical Care as More Helpful in Facilities Where They’re Seen More Often?
A practitioner brief for CIYJ coaches and facility directors
Summary
Across 83 CIYJ facilities, how helpful youth rated their medical care had essentially no relationship to how often incidents resulted in youth being seen by medical staff. Facilities where youth were seen more often were no more likely to have youth who viewed their care as helpful, and no less likely either.
Background
When youth in a facility are involved in an incident, they are sometimes seen by medical staff. Separately, youth are asked in climate surveys how helpful they found the medical care they received. It’s reasonable to expect these two things to move together — that facilities where youth are seen by medical staff more often would also be places where youth feel better about the care they get. If that were true, simply increasing medical contact might be one lever for improving how supported youth feel, which connects to the Safety domain of Performance-based Standards (PbS), where youth perceptions of care and wellbeing matter. This brief tests whether that expected relationship actually shows up in the data. The analysis draws on CIYJ data from 83 facilities across two collection periods, April 2025 and October 2025.
Methods
For each facility in each period, two measures were calculated: the average helpfulness rating youth gave their medical care (on a 1-to-5 scale), and the share of incidents in which youth were seen by medical staff (from 0 to 1). These were then compared across all facility-periods to see whether they tend to rise and fall together. In plain terms, the analysis asks: in facilities where youth are seen by medical staff more often, do youth also tend to rate their care as more helpful? One limitation to keep in mind: the helpfulness rating reflects how youth perceive their care, which is not the same as a verified measure of the care’s quality.
Finding
The two measures showed no meaningful relationship. As the chart below shows, facilities where youth were seen by medical staff more often were no more likely — and no less likely — to have youth who rated their care as helpful. The points scatter widely with no upward or downward drift, and the best-fit line is essentially flat. This pattern held steady across both collection periods; there was no version of the data where a clear relationship emerged. Importantly, a flat result like this does not prove the two are truly unrelated. It means that, in this data, being seen by medical staff more often did not track with how helpful youth found their care — but a real connection could still be masked by factors not captured here, such as the severity or type of incidents involved.
Implications
For a CIYJ coach or facility director, this suggests that how often youth are seen by medical staff and how helpful they find that care may be worth treating as two separate signals, rather than assuming one tells you about the other. A facility with a high rate of medical contact should not be assumed to have youth who feel well cared for — and a facility with lower contact isn’t necessarily falling short on perceived care. Directors reviewing climate results might consider looking at what shapes youth perceptions of care — such as how staff communicate, the overall treatment experience, or follow-up — as a distinct question from how frequently medical contact occurs. This is a worthwhile area to examine further rather than a settled conclusion; the data points to where to look, not to a specific action to take.