What equipment does a Podiatrist use?

What professional equipment does a Podiatrist use?

In order to carry out your assessment and foot care, as Podiatrists we use a pretty wide variety of equipment.

In this blog we’ll explain about some of the podiatrist tools we use, and how we take care of it, to be able to take care of you safely.

The basics (That aren’t so basic!)

The main pieces of professional equipment that we use day-to-day are our instruments. The main ones we use are nail nippers, scalpels, files and dressing packs. The instruments that we have in clinic are reusable, and that means they need some special care to make sure that they are safe to use.

Podiatrists are governed by strict regulations, and some of these cover the hygiene standards that we have to uphold in clinic. For our podiatry surgical instruments, this means keeping them clean and sterile.

After each use, we place our instruments into an ultrasonic bath with detergent to remove any visible debris from them. We then rinse and dry them, and pack them into sealable bags. These bags are then placed into our autoclave. Here they are heated to 136 degrees centigrade, alongside a vacuum which kills off any living cells. The contents of the sealed bags are now sterile until the bags are opened and will be safe to use. Everything we use for foot care is either sterile or single use.

The technical stuff

As well as our day-to-day instruments, we also have some pretty cool gadgets that we use to help us assess and treat your foot conditions.

Doppler – This lets us listen to the pulses in your feet and gives us an idea of the quality of the circulation. It can also help us identify any irregular heartbeats.

Kardia – this is used as a follow up from the Doppler if we detect any irregularity in the heartbeat.

Dermatoscope – Our gadget for examining skin lesions under high magnification. It helps us to differentiate between corns and verrucae, but also to identify possibly suspicious lesions such as moles that have changed in appearance.

Swift machine – This has to be one of the favourites in the clinic. This is what we use for treating verrucae using microwave therapy. To find out more about how this works – check out our blogs here 

Nail drill – a nifty piece of equipment that we use for reducing the thickness of nails and filing rough skin.

For more information on how we can help with your foot problems and put our kit to good use – read about our services here