Nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts voted Monday to approve a new contract, ending the strike that kept them on the picket line. 301 days.

The Massachusetts Nurses Association, which represents 700 nurses on strike, reached a preliminary agreement on December 17 with Tenet Healthcare, the hospital’s parent company in Dallas. Union members have now approved the agreement with 487 votes in favor and 9 votes against. The contract will take effect retrospectively until January 3, 2021, and will be valid until December 31, 2025. The nurse has not had a contract since the end of 2019.

The union announced in a press release that under the agreement, nurses can return to their previous positions within 30 days, and Tenet Healthcare agreed to provide safer working conditions.Saint Vincent’s Hospital will also Keep all permanent replacement nurses It hired employees during the months-long strike.

“This is a long and hard struggle of 700 brave nurses who are doing their best to achieve the improvements we need to ensure the best possible patient care,” the nurse at the hospital and the co-chair of the local nurses association of the Massachusetts Association of Nurses Marlena Pellegrino’s negotiating unit said at a press conference.

“The new contract will provide improvements for patients and our team, and we are very happy to finally end the strike and return our sole focus to patient care,” Caroline Jackson, CEO of St. Vincent Hospital, said at a press conference. “We will set a new tone at St. Vincent’s Hospital: We are a team with a common goal. We will not attack nurses and substitute nurses. Not nurses and management. A team united under the principles of professionalism, excellence, responsibility and compassion.”

According to the nurses union, under the agreement, Tenet Healthcare agreed to maintain specific staffing levels and ratios in different departments and restrict flexible staffing, which allows the hospital to send nurses home when the number of patients is small. Nurses will receive a 2% annual salary increase in the contract, retroactive to January 1, 2021, and pay the salary two years before the end of the last collective bargaining agreement.

The contract also adds two nurses to the hospital’s workforce safety committee to handle workplace violence on behalf of the nurses, and requires the hospital to install metal detectors in the emergency room and provide additional police personnel at night, weekends and holidays.

After two weeks of federal mediation, negotiators reached a preliminary agreement last month.The labor action started in March last year two years later Two years of conversation Unable to reach an agreement between Tenet Healthcare and the nurses union. According to data from the Massachusetts Association of Nurses, this strike is the longest strike by nurses in state history and the longest in the country in 15 years.

Four Massachusetts Congressional Democrats Questioning how Tenet Healthcare uses its COVID-19 relief funds In June last year, the strike took into account the insufficient number of employees. National Nurses United has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate what it calls “exploitative” contracts for new nurses in Tenet Healthcare and two other health systems.

“With this agreement, we can go back to that building proudly, not only proud of what we got in the agreement, but also proud of what we built together as nurses. They know they do it for patients and the community. Everything they can do,” said Dominique Muldoon, a nurse at the hospital and co-chair of the negotiating team, in a press release.