If the system of social rules, indicating desired goals and appropriate means of human action, is well-articulated, coherent, transparent, and legitimized, a sense of order, predictability, regularity, and security is created. The latter is one of the most important human needs – the need for security, broadly understood, and thus, for example: existential, economic, ecological, individual, social, or health-related. The need for security stems primarily from the human tendency to live in a community. The concept of security is one of the most frequently used concepts in the organization and functioning of the state (society) and in science.
Security, as one of the fundamental areas of an entity’s functioning, intended to ensure not only its survival but also its development and the freedom to pursue its interests in a specific environment by taking on challenges, seizing opportunities, reducing risks, and countering all kinds of threats to its interests, is therefore not so much a specific state of affairs as it is a continuous one. This state can change, which is why security should be considered as a process. Security, in an intuitive sense, is a state of certainty, peace, lack of threat, and a sense of being protected or safe.
Taking the above into account, security in the understanding of the authors of this article refers to certain conditions for the implementation of logistics processes and activities carried out in the supply chain (including the blood supply chain), which determine the achievement of set goals – in the case of logistics – availability (availability of blood and its components) guaranteeing freedom from threats. A threat is any situation whose occurrence (in the context of defined security conditions) will jeopardize the achievement of the set goal. A threat, as an antonym of security, usually refers in considerations to the sphere of consciousness (of a given entity, or a group of cooperating entities – the supply chain) and means a certain state of mind or consciousness caused by the perception of phenomena assessed as unfavorable, dangerous, or unacceptable. Thus, the perception of threats is always subjective and essentially reflects the feelings and assessments formulated by a given entity in their specific states. In the authors’ opinion, identifying the locations of potential threats that could significantly hinder or prevent the achievement of the logistics system’s goals is something different.
Bearing in mind, in the context of the blood supply chain, that every threat (deviation from the desired state) reduces the effectiveness of the assistance provided to those in need, it thereby reduces the security of both the functioning of blood supply chains and the patient themselves. Therefore, a necessary condition for countering events resulting from security threats should be:
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detection and identification of threats – recognition of the type and magnitude of the event
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prevention of the occurrence of a given type of threat
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preparation of the entity in case of the activation of a given type of security threat in the form of an event (education, deployment, and availability of countermeasure forces and resources)
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increasing the effectiveness of the forces and resources of the system for countering the effects of a given event
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effectiveness of actions in removing the consequences of a given event.
The authors of this article have set as their goal to indicate the locations (events or their sequences) of potential threats to the security of blood supply chains in Poland.
The article comes from the journal “Logistyka” 2/2011.