Lutra Ventures: what it is & why

Lutra Ventures Ltd is the company behind everything on this site that isn't the NHS.

I set it up because the work had outgrown the arrangement. Medical assessment fees, print sales, a 3D printer running in the corner of the flat, the occasional commission: all of it was arriving in the same place as my salary and none of it was being accounted for properly. A limited company draws a line. Anything that isn't my clinical training sits on one side of it, with its own bank account, its own books & its own tax position.

The name is a small joke that I'm not going to apologise for. Lutra lutra is the Eurasian otter, a species that spent most of the 20th century disappearing from British rivers after organochlorine pesticides worked their way up the food chain, and has since recovered enough to be recorded in every English county. Adaptable, territorial, does well in more than one element. It seemed apt.

What it covers

Medical assessment. I work as a contracted medical assessor, which uses the clinical training without being clinical practice. It is careful, structured work: read the evidence, examine, form a view, write it down so that somebody else can follow the reasoning.

Photography. Portraits, underwater & healthcare work, which is the oldest part of the business and the reason the site exists at all. Commissions, print sales & licensing all run through here.

3D printing & product design. This started as a curiosity and turned into Otterly Marvellous, a small range of nature-themed cards & printed objects. Bird feeder trays, relief pieces, greeting cards. The design work interests me more than the printing does.

Consulting. Before medicine I took a master's in international business & spent several years in strategic foresight & innovation advisory, largely in transport. That work has not stopped being useful. If anything, the NHS has more unexamined process in it than any sector I worked in beforehand.

Why the mix

The honest answer is that I have never been able to pick one thing, and I have stopped treating that as a flaw to be corrected. The forensic science degree taught me to look at evidence properly. The business years taught me how organisations actually decide things, as opposed to how they say they do. Photography taught me to notice. Medicine uses all three, most days, without anybody naming it.

Lutra Ventures is just the container that lets those run alongside each other without getting tangled up in my training number.

If you have something that fits any of the above, the contact page is the place to start.