Ensuring safe and effective clinical waste streams is of paramount importance to any NHS trust. Talisman Security Seals, a manufacturer of tamper evident security seals since 1974, offer a range of services to ensure effective clinical waste flow.


With such staggering variety and complexity of NHS’s waste streams, hospitals are increasingly looking to maximise the efficiency of their waste operations. Failure to do so can have serious consequences. The Health Technical Memorandum (HTM) 07-01 states, emphasises this point, stating that: “The management of healthcare waste is an essential part of ensuring that healthcare activities do not pose a risk or potential risk of infection and are securely managed.”

Many NHS Trusts cover a wide area, encompassing several sites and producing thousands of bags of clinical waste very year. All of which needs to be sealed. Needless to say, storing and supplying tags across a large trust can be a logistical nightmare.

Talisman understand the constraints of trust stores departments and, with UK-based production facilities, can manufacture and store a Trust’s clinical waste seals for them – regardless of required size.

This means that Talisman can fulfil larger NHS clinical waste contracts with ease, either manufacturing clinical waste ties to dispatch to a specific schedule, or holding stock in our warehouse for call-off when required. This provides Trusts with very quick lead times, without having to store seals on site.

Ensuring a clear audit trail

With such complexity of clinical waste streams, tracking waste sacks from their point of origin – a requirement for trusts by law – can pose major problems for any hospital. This requirement means that hospitals must provide thousands of traceable bags every year.

Talisman specialise in providing clinical waste seals into the healthcare sector, so waste ties they produce are customisable with unique serial numbers. Audit trails are also offered for free via their website. This online audit trail is accessible 24 hour a day on any device.

Talisman customers can then use clinical waste tags unique to them and, with an online audit trail allows for easy tracking, the need for manually updating spreadsheets is negated. Overall traceability becomes much simpler and less time consuming and the scope for human error us drastically reduced. The financial savings from reducing resources currently used in clinical waste audit trail management systems can be substantial.

Ambulance service support

In transporting huge numbers of seals to secure medicines and equipment securely, ambulances require large numbers of high-quality seals. Challenges lie in ensuring that seals are both tamper-proof while ensuring paramedics have easy access to contents in critical situations.

Talisman Security Seals supply several ambulance services a variety of seals, custom built to suit their needs, that are easy to remove. Talisman will also hold stocks of custom product if the ambulance service doesn’t have storage capacity. Furthermore, a Talisman seal is completely tamper-evident, and is overall far more secure than a regular cable tie.

Talisman customers benefit from being able access a custom security seal tailored to their needs, with immediate availability, at an affordable price without organising extra storage space.