Measuring general hospital staff attitudes towards people with learning disabilities.

People with learning disabilities often experience health inequalities and barriers to healthcare services as a result of poor communication and discriminatory attitudes. We developed an educational package for healthcare staff as well as an attitude questionnaire to measure the impact of this training; the questionnaire is called the Attitudes of Secondary Healthcare Personnel Toward People with Severe Learning Disabilities (ASH-LD). This article describes the process of designing and piloting the ASH-LD questionnaire, and how it will be used to measure the effect of the planned training on staff attitudes.