Posted on the Minnesota Nurses Association's (MNA) blog is a YouTube video of Queen's "We are the Champions," published hours after the union and the Twin Cities hospitals announced a contract agreement Thursday, after months of butting heads.

The hospitals' take-backs and concessions are not included in the settlement, nor are there changes to the nurses' pension plans, according to an announcement posted on the blog.

"In essence, your entire contract has been completely protected and preserved," the announcement reads.

The union needs 51 percent of its members to vote in favor of the three-year contract in order for it to be approved, which will take place today, according to an MNA e-mail sent to DOTmed News.

If the members do not ratify the contract, both parties will go back to the negotiation table. The open-ended strike that was supposed to begin today has been rescinded, and the union will have to go through the entire strike process again should it decide a strike is the best road to take.

"Obviously we do not expect that situation to happen," said MNA's spokesman John Nemo in an announcement sent to DOTmed News.

The nurses held the largest strike in nursing history on June 10, after months of bargaining with the hospitals to settle on a new contract. The main issue was not economics, but the patient-to-nurse ratios, which the nurses claimed were inappropriate and a risk to patient safety.

"Economics aren't the issue," Nemo told DOTmed News in May. "The real issue that nurses are willing to strike over is the patient safety issue...Our nurses feel [that] with the recent layoffs and cutbacks through the recession, [hospitals] are asking the remaining nurses to do more with less. It's getting to the point where nurses think [hospitals] are dangerously understaffed, where patients' lives are at risk."

But the announcement posted on the MNA blog reads, "Just because we ultimately could not get the safe staffing language we wanted in this particular contract does not mean this was a failure or that it can't happen in the near future."

What is in the settlement, explained hospital spokeswoman Maureen Schriner, is a "renewed commitment" to look at the staffing issues presented by both nurses and hospitals through existing committees.

"It involved a lot of hard work," Schriner told DOTmed News. "We got an agreement that's in the best interest of the patients and the community, and avoided the strike," which was slated to start today.

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