With teachers preparing to vote on ratifying their deal with the B.C. government, the province’s nurses appear to be next in line for contract talks – but some are already gearing up for a fight.

Nurses in Nanaimo took to the street Wednesday to rally against a new patient care model they say has left them brutally understaffed at Nanaimo General Hospital.

“They can’t let this continue,” said Gayle Duteil, the president of the BC Nurses’ Union. “I walked the hospital on Sunday night. I saw nurses with eight patients, fresh, post-op patients. The conditions on some of those floors were horrible, and I’m a practicing nurse.”

Duteil says the current conditions are a result of replacing nurses with care aides – and failing to hire nurses to keep up with demand.

B.C.’s nurses are largely an essential service, but reducing overtime could impact less important surgeries. Unionized hospital workers already say they will not cross picket lines, and that could lead to even further disruptions.

In the tentative deal struck this week, B.C. teacher’s received a 7.25 per cent raise over the six years – a deal worth a raise of only a few hundred dollars a year over what other public sector workers are getting.

According to a local labour expert, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of wiggle room for negotiations.

“The government basically held the line on its wage guidelines,” said Mark Thompson of the Sauder School of Business. “They were happy about that I’m sure, and it would be much harder for any of the unions coming forward to try to break that guideline. If the teachers couldn’t do it after three weeks on strike, what hope is there?”

B.C. Premier Christy Clark, on the other hand, sounded optimistic that there would be room to negotiate.

“We squirrelled away the money for those increases for all of the 300,000 public employees for whom we pay,” Clark said Thursday at a news conference in Kelowna. “ With a little more than half done, we’ve still got some money left over to make sure we can look after everybody else, including nurses, who will be bargaining soon. We budgeted for it, it’s there.”

That money paid for a fund to hire new teachers. If similar funds can be used to hire more nurses, another costly strike could be avoided.

With a report from CTV Vancouver's Jon Woodward