Background
The Virtual Emergency Care and Transfer Resource Service (VECTRS) is the provincial coordination centre for:
- Urgent and emergent specialty consultation and virtual care
- Medical and resuscitation support for healthcare providers and paramedics
- Activation of teams providing stroke, trauma, STEMI, and other resuscitative care
- Inter-facility transfer (IFT) triage and prioritization
- Patient destination and consultation decision-making that will be supported on-site by Shared Health Patient Flow and Utilization
A vector is a Latin word that means carrier. Vectors have direction and magnitude.
Analogously, VECTRS will be directing patient consults and transfers to desired endpoints.
The other Canadian provinces have centres to coordinate consultation and patient flow. A few examples are Alberta’s Referral, Access, Advice, Placement, Information & Destination (RAAPID), BC’s Rapid Access to Consultative Expertise (RACE), and Ontario’s CritiCall (ON).
The significant disruption associated with the pandemic to normal health service delivery and processes led to Shared Health’s Emergency Response Services (ERS) being asked to develop a robust clinical patient consultation and transfer coordination centre for Manitoba, as an adjunct to the existing 911 and transport communications centres in Brandon (Medical Transportation Coordination Centre) and Winnipeg (Fire and Paramedic Service).
Planning began in 2023. Space acquisition and renovation, Digital Health and call centre projects, staffing, policy/process/workflow development, consultation/partnership with healthcare providers and agencies, and other requirements have advanced sufficiently to enable VECTRS to stage and progressively implement the intended services while ensuring safe and consistent provision of the implemented services in each stage.
Resources have allowed for a few services to be provided up to this point. Trauma team activations have resulted in earlier interventions and improved outcomes. Stroke 25 team activations at HSC have significantly improved multiple delays, with a 40 per cent reduction in the time from arrival to completion of CT imaging and improvements in the time to treatments. Ground IFTs in Winnipeg and air IFTs from northern Manitoba are now triaged and prioritized with improved movement of patients by acuity level.
VECTRS is staffed 24/7 with Emergency Physicians (EP), Advanced Practice Respiratory Therapists (APRTs), Advanced Care Paramedics (ACPs), Inter-Facility Transfer Coordinators (IFTCs). A Patient Flow Manager will be based at VECTRS in December to support flow coordination. VECTRS staff will play a progressively larger and crucial role in assisting healthcare providers in rural/remote EDs and non- ED facilities such as nursing stations.
On November 5, 2024, the triage and prioritization of all ground and air IFT requests within Manitoba was consolidated within VECTRS. The addition of VECTRS clinicians to the IFT triage and prioritization process will help better align patients with the care they need and the proper transport resource. These IFT process improvements through VECTRS has been in place for air transports from NRHA since September 2023. As well, VECTRS has been triaging all IFT upgrade requests, since July 2024
