There may be a little CYA going on. It sounds like things may have been bungled somewhere along the line.
It's easy to get lost on the roads out there unless you travel them every day. All the roads branching off the road look the same. There are no lights, few of the roads are marked and its difficult to know if a road has houses on it or just dead ends in the middle of the woods. No one should have been out there on foot, in that weather, late at night. It would have been very dark.
I've done genealogy research looking for old cemeteries, churches, etc. off the roads in that area. It's easy to get lost in daylight. The roads are difficult to walk or drive on. I'm not sure about that road, but in most areas there's little or no cell phone signal. Descendants of the Eye family have been living in that area since the 1830's.
JMO It's a very sad situation that wasn't the fault of the patient or her family. Washington County is not a rich county by any means. Human services could stand a lot of new funding in that area. I still don't understand why she had to sit in the waiting room at the hospital for 5 hours.
