National Healthcare Screening Animations

The NHS is the UK’s National Health Service, one of the largest publicly funded health services in the world, providing healthcare to over 67 million people. The NHS National Screening Programme runs a series of screening and testing services throughout a person’s lifetime, from antenatal checks and newborn bloodspot screening through to adult cancer screening programmes.

Nutmeg Productions has worked with the NHS as an animation agency across multiple commissions, developing a long-standing relationship built on the NHS’s trust in our ability to handle complex health information with clarity, accuracy and care.

The NHS commissioned Nutmeg to create a series of animations explaining the testing, screening and medical procedures available on the NHS throughout a person’s lifetime, from the earliest stages of pregnancy through to newborn screening and beyond. The films needed to be clinically accurate, clearly structured and accessible to the widest possible range of patients.

A central requirement was accessibility: the animations needed to work for NHS patients from every background and community across the UK. Each film was tested with focus groups to ensure that the visuals, voiceover and storytelling style were relevant and understandable across different cultural contexts before being translated into 12 languages representing the many languages spoken in NHS settings across the UK.

We developed the brand look and feel for the series from the ground up — creating a consistent visual language and recurring cast of characters that would carry audiences from film to film across the full series. The family introduced in the first film reappears throughout the series, giving patients a familiar and human point of reference as they encounter different screening processes at different life stages.

Each animation uses a clear and simple narrative structure to explain what each screening involves, why it is offered and where patients can find more information. The tone is informative without being clinical, warm and accessible in a way that invites engagement rather than creating anxiety about medical procedures.

Focus groups were used to test both the visual approach and the voiceover before production was finalised, ensuring the films worked across different communities and cultural contexts. The completed animations were then translated into 12 languages, making this a linguistically comprehensive NHS public health animation resource, still in active use.

A series of eight animations that are actively used across NHS services today, giving patients across the UK access to clear, consistent information about the screening and testing available to them throughout their lives, in their own language.

This series reflects the ongoing nature of Nutmeg’s relationship with the NHS as an animation agency. Being trusted to develop the visual identity and character family for a national screening series, and to extend it across multiple films over time signals a level of creative and clinical understanding that we appreciate as a supplier to the NHS.