An advocate for Yukoners with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder has called on the territorial government to do more to help FASD-affected youth in care, following a young man's traumatic experience in government care last month.

Bernice Whelan has taken her 18-year-old foster son, who has brain damage from fetal alcohol exposure, back to her current home in Newfoundland and Labrador, where she says she wants to help him rebuild his life.

The teen had spent the past year and a half at the Children's Receiving Home when he fell, hit his head and suffered severe frostbite on his hands on the streets of Whitehorse last month.

"It's tragic, it's heartbreaking, and it didn't need to happen," Deb Evensen, executive director of the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Society in the Yukon, told CBC News.

"He fell through the cracks because he didn't have the kind of support that he needed because he has the kind of brain difference that he has."

Whelan, who raised the youth since he was a baby, told CBC News the Yukon government had promised to place the boy in a family home when she retired and returned to her home province in 2007.

Instead, the youth ended up at the receiving home. Whelan said her foster son often called her at night from the streets of Whitehorse.

Before she and her foster son left for Newfoundland and Labrador on Friday, Whelan said the Department of Health and Social Services agreed to pay for her foster son's plane ticket, as well as two months worth of social assistance.

"I don't think he should be on welfare. I think the government should at least give him a year to get back to where he was, because he needs a lot of mental health help," she said Friday.

"Then I want to get him into an apprenticeship, so it's just enough to support him financially."

Evensen said the teen should not have been placed at the Children's Receiving Home for a year and a half, adding that youth at the home should be monitored 24 hours a day.

Evensen said while children in government care are generally more likely to have prenatal alcohol exposure, she said the Health and Social Services Department is not screening children for fetal alcohol syndrome-related issues.

"If the children were apprehended [and] they were screened for this kind of brain injury, then we would be able to set up the kind of programs that we need that could actually work," she said.

"We'd save a heck of a lot of money for all the systems."

Whelan said deputy health minister Stuart Whitley told her he is looking into her foster son's case.