Description
This training is designed for professionals tasked with organizing treatment programs and care plans for individuals with complex neurodevelopment profiles. It introduces a planning strategy designed to reinforce a deeper understanding of FASD, emerging best practices, and the issues that require enhanced responses.
Individuals and families living with FASD are frequent seekers of specialized health, education and mental health services but report poor outcomes that can destabilize lives. Maintaining stability requires understanding and confidence to explain a confusing pattern of development, function and pre and postnatal experiences: trauma, neglect, disability. Formal assessments and informal reports hold keys to atypical neurodevelopment that improve outcomes when they are identified, explained and integrated into mainstream service protocols.
FASD Community of Practice (Badry 2018) identified a need for common language and service coordination. This required a framework for professionals who were still learning to integrate FASD knowledge into their practice. Research on FASD, secondary disabilities, and adverse outcomes (Streissguth et al, 1996, 1997, Conry and Fast 2000, May 2004) is combined with the Canadian FASD Diagnosis Guidelines (2015) to help organize our understanding and response to FASD.
Learning Outcomes
1) Explain FASD terminology, the diagnostic process and assessment criteria
2) Identify areas of brain function impacted by prenatal exposure to alcohol
3) Understand FASD profile variables and postnatal factors that impact the individual and the family
4) Define elements for placement stability and enhanced outcomes
5) Describe FASD service planning and considerations for long-term support