Launching the NICHE Leeds Virtual Care Home
I am delighted to launch the NICHE Leeds Virtual Care Home.
This was a way to turn research into stories that people can connect with.
The Virtual Care Home was designed as a space where we can explore research through characters, settings and everyday situations. It gives us a consistent, creative way to turn our work into accessible, engaging resources for care homes.
The COMMIT Study
We built the Virtual Care Home around a single piece of research: the COMMIT study.
COMMIT explores the barriers and enablers to providing mouth care in care homes. While access to dental services is a wider challenge, this study focuses on what care staff themselves can do, giving them the knowledge, confidence and tools to act.
From the research we have created, posters, leaflets, information sheets, and an animated video.
All of these use a storytelling approach, so staff can see situations they recognise and relate to the characters on screen. With a diverse cast, we wanted carers, residents, families and friends to feel represented and heard.
The materials are being shared with our partner care homes, but they are also free for anyone to use. We hope people will send us photos and feedback, so we can keep improving the resources and continue working collaboratively with care homes.
The design
From the beginning, the Virtual Care Home was always intended to be animated. This allows us to:
- Represent diversity
- Explore sensitive topics
- Create new characters and locations quickly
- Anonymise real experiences while still telling honest stories
The visual style was inspired by late-90s and early-2000s cartoons, simple, expressive, and practical for animation and interactivity.
The first character designs were drawn by me and loosely borrowed from shows I grew up with. As the project developed, we worked with illustrator and graphic novel designer Lucy Freeman, whose character and background design brought the care home to life in a way that felt warm, grounded and believable.
Lucy was new to working in research, but she was drawn to NICHE Leeds’ work and felt that this kind of medium could “bring awareness” and “make an actual change in care homes.”
The animation
A key aim of the Virtual Care Home is to turn complex research into short, digestible videos that fit into the busy lives of care home staff.
We worked with York-based Hijinks Studios to take the story from script to screen. The animation was broken into three parts:
- An introduction to the research
- A focus on mouth care
- How to get involved
This allows the content to be shared more easily on social media, as well as used in care homes.
Hijinks usually work with museums and cultural heritage sites, so this was their first time working with researchers. For many of the team, the subject matter was personal, with experiences of relatives in care homes and living with dementia which made the project especially meaningful.
Over four months, the animation moved from script to storyboard, to animatic, to final cut. We are really looking forward to working with Lucy and Hijinks again as we explore new topics in the Virtual Care Home.
What’s next
This is only the beginning for the Virtual Care Home. As we develop the characters and stories further, we will continue to experiment with new formats and resources to make sure our research is truly engaging and useful.
If you’re interested in the making of the animation and illustrations, keep an eye out for a full interview with Lucy and the Hijinks team. I’ll also be sharing a video soon that walks through the website and how the materials were created.
If you’re interested in creative dissemination but don’t know where to start, feel free to contact me at
I’d be very happy to hear about your project and offer suggestions.
Links:
NICHE Leeds Virtual Care Home: Virtual Care Home - Niche
Lucy Freeman: LUCY FREEMAN | ART
Hijinks Studios: Home | Hijinks Studios
Written By Terry Hall.
04/02/2026
15:54