People who don't have a family doctor will suffer as a result of service delivery changes at the Northside General Hospital in North Sydney, N.S., critics say.

Beginning Monday, registration hours at the emergency room will be extended from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., but doctors and staff will only treat patients until 6 p.m. Patients with non-urgent needs could be sent home and asked to return another day or to see their family doctor.

The emergency room will continue to be closed overnight, with urgent cases being treated at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital in Sydney.

It's all an effort to prevent emergency room doctors from burning out and to cut down on daytime emergency room closures when no doctor can be found to work.

Lisa Bond of the group Save Our Services Northside General says reducing emergency room hours is not the solution — recruiting more family doctors is.

"People wouldn't be going to Northside General for non-emergency services if they had a family doctor or a clinic they could go to," she said. "Nobody wants to wait six hours to get a prescription refilled, but we don't have a clinic over here and a lot of people don't have family doctors and they also don't have the transportation to get to Sydney."

Bond says she knows of many people in the North Sydney area who are extremely upset by the changes.

"There's a lot of elderly people on the Northside that not only don't have doctors — they don't drive," she said. "They're looking at $50 to get a cab to the emergency room in Sydney and then another $50 to get a cab back.

"Senior citizens on a fixed income, they can't afford it. They end up going without treatment."

Bond, who ran unsuccessfully for the NDP in the last provincial election, has two children with special needs. She says she frequently visited the emergency room herself for prescriptions and childhood illnesses because she was without a family doctor for three years.

S.O.S. proposes the Nova Scotia Health Authority open a walk-in clinic on the Northside for those without a doctor, and hire nurse practitioners to staff the emergency room overnight.

Eddie Orrell, who represents Northside-Westmount for the Progressive Conservative Party in the provincial legislature, says health officials need to get to the bottom of the family doctor shortage.

"We have doctors from Cape Breton that are studying abroad, that have studied in med schools across this country," Orrell said. "They can't get a residency program back here in our province. Why? Find out those reasons. Deal with that solution. You'll have no problem recruiting doctors here."

Orrell calls the changes at the Northside General emergency room 'a Band-Aid solution' with no real plan to recruit more doctors.

"We've lost over 30 doctors in the last year. Nobody knows why. They haven't had an exit interview on why a doctor leaves here," he said. "People get sick in Cape Breton just like in the city. So recruit more doctors to stay here."