05/11/2026    Keith L. Gurnick, DPM

Controlling Theft of Instruments in Treatment Rooms (Elliot Udell, DPM)

Each and every practice is different. Some
podiatrists have offices in large medical
buildings, some work in hospital owned clinics.
Some podiatrists work in free-standing buildings
and others have offices in strip malls. Our
patients and office staff come from a wide
diversity of backgrounds and ethics and morals.
Instruments left out on the counter, or even in
treatment room drawers can be taken by patients,
office staff, nurses, assistants and the cleaning
crew, or on occasion can be also mistakenly be
moved from one room to the next.

One way to avoid instrument theft is to have (and
use) locking drawers, and also to not leave your
instruments where a patient or the cleaning crew
can take them when the doctor exits the treatment
room. If you open a double wrapped sterile pack,
when you are done, close the pack up and remove it
from the room, or lock it in a drawer.

With respect to sterility, we are no longer in
the 1980s and the days of a cold liquid
sterilization in a tray just does not cut it for
our modern practices. We are now in 2026. All
surgical procedural instruments should be properly
steam or gas sterilized. With respect to the
instruments used for general palliative toenail
and callus care and skin tissue debridement, those
instruments should be sterile, and all disposable
blades should properly discarded in the sharps
container after each individual patient. Guess
what, your patients see and hear everything.

Opening a new sterile pack in front of the patient
is the only way a patient, and the doctor and your
nurses can have 100% confidence that you are using
sterilized instruments. And yes, if you do lots of
C&C each day, this means you need lots of sterile
packs each with about six or seven basic
instruments and tools ready to go, and you might
have to use the sterilizer a few times each day as
well.

Keith L. Gurnick, DPM, Los Angeles, CA

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