Wraparound was initially developed in the 1980s as a means for maintaining youth with the most serious emotional and behavioral problems in their home and community.
During the wraparound process, a team of individuals who are relevant to the well-being of the child or youth (e.g., family members, other natural supports, service providers, and agency representatives) collaboratively develop an individualized plan of care, implement this plan, and evaluate success over time.
The wraparound process, and the plan itself, is designed to be culturally competent, strengths based, and organized around family members’ own perceptions of needs, goals, and likelihood of success of specific strategies.
During the wraparound process, a team of individuals who are relevant to the well-being of the child or youth (e.g., family members and other natural supports, service providers, and agency representatives) collaboratively develop an individualized plan of care, implement this plan, and evaluate success over time.
to be culturally competent, strengths-based, and organized around family members' own perceptions of needs, goals, and likelihood of success of specific strategies.
As a result, the lead agency responsible for implementing the wraparound process for families must support implementation in several key ways, including maintaining adequately low caseload sizes; ensuring that primary staff receive comprehensive training and skill development; supporting wraparound team efforts to get necessary members to attend meetings and participate collaboratively; and making timely decisions regarding funding for strategies developed by teams to meet families’ unique needs.
One-on-one assistance to children and families while implementing the child's individual treatment plan in the home, school or community.
Thus, at the current juncture, there is some consensus that the research base on wraparound is largely positive but that more rigorous evaluation is needed (Farmer, Dorsey, & Mustillo, (2004)).
More comprehensive examples of how wraparound has been implemented in schools can be found at the Illinois Positive Behavioral Support network website,[2] and in Eber (2003).
[5] Service providers are evaluated for their fidelity to a specific model through credentialing of documents, meetings, and demonstration of concepts.
Taken together, the findings provided moderate evidence for better outcomes for the wraparound program; however, differences appear somewhat limited to boys and externalizing problems.
STUDY 2: Matched comparison study (18 months) of youth in child welfare custody in Nevada: 33 in wraparound vs. 32 receiving MH services as usual References: Bruns, Rast, Walker, Bosworth, & Peterson, 2006; Rast, Bruns, Brown, Peterson, & Mears (in submission).
Mean CAFAS scores for youth in wraparound decreased significantly across all waves of data collection (6, 12, 18 months) in comparison to the traditional services group.
RESULTS: Study supported the hypothesis that youth who received wraparound services were less likely to engage in subsequent at-risk and delinquent behavior.
Overall, small sample size plus loss of data on many of the outcome measures resulted in the study having very low power to detect differences between groups.
Limitations of this study include the short time span (6 months) and whether the demonstration project truly followed the wraparound process.
Authors stated the “wrap” condition had access to informal services and flexible funding, but authors did not assess “wrapness” and stated that, “there is no evidence that the content or the quality of the services were different for the Wraparound children.” (p. 151) STUDY 7: Quasi-experimental (24 months) study of youths with serious mental health issues in urban Baltimore: 45 returned or diverted from residential care to wraparound vs. 24 comparison.
Youths received ratings of “good” if they were living in regular community placements, attending school and/or working for the majority of the week, and had fewer than three days of serious behavior problems during the course of previous month.
At 2-year follow-up, 47% of the wraparound groups received a rating of good, compared to 8% of youths in traditional MH services.
The authors tracked occurrence of five behaviors (compliance, peer interactions, physical aggression, alcohol and drug use, and extreme verbal abuse) for each of the youths.