Evaluating a training package for staff working with people with learning disabilities prior to hospital closure

As part of the process of deinstitutionalization and hospital retraction, agencies for people with learning disabilities have attempted to develop a new vision of their services creating a need for training initiatives aimed at enabling stafftotake on new roles. The evaluation of such training programmes is problematic. Mansell (1989) has noted that assessing "whether training, or any other kind of innovation, has any effect in complex organizations is difficult and is, therefore, rarely attempted" (p. 142). Evaluations of such training programmes have measured various outcomes including attitude change (Rose and Holmes, 1991), self-ratings (Mansell, 1989) and evidence of changes in practice (e.g. the number of staffed housing schemes developed after training: Mansell, 1989). The present study attempted to evaluate the effects of a training package for staff employed by an independent agency Community Care (a pseudonym) which was to take responsibility for accommodating over a hundred people with learning disabilities following the retraction of Willowfield (a pseudonym), a hospital, in March 1991.