Due to crisis events that have shocked several college and university campuses, many of these institutions have begun to look for ways to respond effectively to those events. However, higher education is generally not equipped or prepared to respond to crisis events. Thus, crisis management research in higher education should be explored. Principles of organizational learning and organizational development from corporate management America were used in this qualitative study to explain how leaders in higher education institutions prepare for crises and learn from their crisis experiences. Chaos theory provided the theoretical lens for the study. Purposeful sampling was utilized to select two institutions and purposely identified administrators at those sites. Interviews gleaned the lived experiences of the participants. Data analysis revealed five themes: conflicting definitions, institutional response to crisis, continuous learning, institutional issues related to a crisis, and leadership roles during a crises. The findings support the importance of developing a crisis management plan, disseminating the plan to all stakeholders, and application of continuous learning principles to evaluate the plan and actual crises responses before, during, and after a crisis event.

Society today is increasingly exposed to the effects of emergencies. These situations not only affect the normal functioning of the society but also the functioning of medical facilities. The preparedness of medical facilities is a very important factor influencing the success in dealing with emergencies and crisis situations. The preparedness of the health care system as a whole consists of all medical facilities in the Czech Republic. Therefore, it is desirable that they are prepared to address them. The objective of the thesis, in its theoretical part, was to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of crisis preparedness in medical facilities. The practical part was intended to introduce in more detail the territory of the South Moravian Region and its issues and to map out emergency preparedness in the specified research set. The research set included medical facilities in the region that are not university hospitals but that are part of the region traumatology plan. The data on this issue was collected using a questionnaire. The questionnaire was in a format of selected work indicators of emergency preparedness and it was uniform for all the respondents. The work indicators were as follows: theoretical preparedness, organizational preparedness and practical preparedness. Based on the questionnaire survey, analysis of the results and determining the average level of preparedness of all the participating medical facilities, it was concluded that the preparedness of the medical facilities of a non-university type in the South Moravian Region is very diverse: from hospitals whose preparedness is excellent to those who do not reach the required basis. In the overall assessment, 40.0 % of the respondents did not reach the determined average. Overall, the level of preparedness of the research set can be seen as slightly below average. To increase the level of preparedness of non-university medical facilities, it is suggested, for example, to create unified procedures for processing various types of plans, to assign each medical facility the obligation to employ a professional emergency manager, and to establish cooperation among individual medical facilities.