Next time I was at that assisted living facility, I replayed this experience and asked "don't your bus drivers ensure that residents arrive at their destination?"
There have been a lot of ugly stories on the news of bad things in eldercare facilities but little reporting of the good things or good locations. Both exist and at least some of the stories we hear are true, good or bad. My mother lived her final years in a full-care facility and they were wonderful with staff who seemed to be angelic.
That story strikes a cord with me because we presently live in what can be termed an "age in place" facility, which has 3 levels of independent living, assisted living, memory care, full care, adult day care, hospice, and in-home assistance, all in different facilities on a single campus. We have several residents who live in independent facilities while a spouse is in memory of full care. I am both a resident and a part-time driver for the facility. More than half of those in independent living do have cars and drive but not all. Drivers are available for medical appointments and other similar things and we also run a bus to Walmart and grocery stores weekly and to many other places either monthly or as needed. Drivers here do assist residents within reason but there are situations that can limit that. If the resident is living in independent living it is expected that they can do most things for themselves and while we try to help, there are times that it simply isn't possible. Medical appointments can be problematic since parking is often very limited or far away in many of the medial complexes which means that we simply can't do a lot more than drop the resident and pick them up.
Residents in assisted living do get significantly more help than those in independent living but even then if a driver is sent to pick up a resident and they are alone, we simply can't be in 2 places at once and the parking issue can still be problematic. On shopping trips, our assisted residents always have either staff or volunteers who do with them, a person for every 2 residents. The fact is that in all senior care situations, the staff are very limited in what they can do or require due to legislation on citizen rights and we are very dependent on the family of our residents to step in when a resident has dementia or such and needs help, but all too often that doesn't happen and we are left to manage as best we can. In our community we recruit volunteers from our independent living residents to ride along and assist those residents as much as possible, but if that resident resists there is nothing that we have the authority or ability to do.
The response was a stern "this is ASSISTED living; If we see someone who's a little confused, they're out of here".
I don't understand that statement at all. If the resident is in independent living that might be true in some facilities, but I have never heard of any with that sort of attitude for assistant living. That sounds like one of those homes in the news stories.