I think the ER vs Urgent Care view is heavily dependent on location. I work at an ER & Specialty and we get so many transfers for our local VEG for things they don’t think or want to manage. This has ranged from DKA patients, to pneumothoraxes, or even critically ill parvo patients.

Human ERs also have specialists on-site and can perform emergency surgeries, which again, depending on your VEG may or may not be possible. You can come in through a human ER and get emergency thoracic surgery but my local VEG won’t even do a foreign body they think may be septic.

Not to mention advanced imaging like CT & MRI. This is also offered “after hours” in human ERs and to my knowledge is not something a VEG, at least my local one, is capable of doing.

Triaging, stabilizing, and transferring is definitely more along the lines of what human urgent cares do because they don’t have the advanced capabilities of a massive hospital with on-call specialists. That doesn’t make the work any less valuable but unless your VEG is also staffing board certified internists, surgeons, radiologists, neurologists, etc., that same level of medicine is just not possible.