For nearly the second consecutive month the emergency department at the Glace Bay Hospital will be closed.

The lack of physicians to cover shifts saw the facility open only a handful of times in the month of June, and now the Nova Scotia Health Authority says it will stay closed for the entire month of July. 

“They were going to expand the emergency room in Glace Bay,” said resident Earl Morgan. “But for the last couple months, it's been closed. I’m very disappointed.”

It's not only residents in Glace Bay that will be without emergency services this weekend. North Sydney and New Waterford hospitals are also closed, with Baddeck only open for a couple of hours over the Canada Day weekend.

Anyone needing urgent care will have to travel here to the Cape Breton Regional.

“It's difficult for everyone having to go into Sydney and wait for hours on end,” said resident Jean McAdam. “It's not looking good.”

Fabian Murphy says Cape Breton doesn’t get the quality of health care that other parts of Canada do.

“I lived in Toronto for 47 years and I’ve never seen a hospital closed up there,” Murphy said.

One Cape Breton physician says the problem with the health-care system is not where you might think.

“The ER is not the problem,” said Dr. Chris Milburn, the ER chief for the health authority's eastern zone. “The problem is people don't have access to family doctors, people don't have access to after-hours clinics. There's specialty clinics that could run better to take care of their patients.”

Due to ER closures like the one in Glace Bay, people are travelling an hour to the Baddeck hospital, but it, too, has been closed for most of the Canada Day weekend.

“You're stressing the resources there more and more,” said Milburn. “They have enough resources to look after their own area. They don't have enough resources to look after the people in the CBRM.”

Milburn says the public can expect these types of mass closures for a while to come.

Soldier's Memorial Hospital in Middleton, N.S., is also closed for much of the weekend.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Kyle Moore.