The Relationship Between Client Characteristics and Wraparound Services in Substance Use Disorder Treatment Centers

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) recommends a comprehensive treatment program for individuals with substance use disorder (SUD) in order to treat needs they often have in addition to their SUD. Specifically, NIDA suggests providing services related to the following issues: medical care, mental health care, HIV/AIDS, child care, educational, vocational, family counseling, housing, transportation, financial, and legal. By providing a comprehensive model that combines core and wraparound services, treatment centers can deliver a higher quality of treatment. In this article, we assessed the relationship between client characteristics and the availability of wraparound services in SUD treatment centers.

We combined two nationally representative samples of treatment centers and used a negative binomial regression and a series of logistic regressions to analyze the relationship between client characteristics and wraparound services.

On average, centers offered fewer than half of the wraparound services endorsed by NIDA. Our results indicated that client characteristics were significantly related to the provision of wraparound services. Most notably, the proportion of adolescent clients was positively related to educational services, the proportion of female clients was positively related to child care, but the proportion of clients referred from the criminal justice system was negatively associated with the provision of multiple wraparound services.

Our findings have important implications for SUD clients and suggest that, although centers are somewhat responsive to their clients' ancillary needs, most centers do not offer the majority of wraparound services.