Two Austrian nurses who spent 40 years on a South Korean island treating Hansen's disease patients have received an achievement award from the International Council of Nurses' Florence Nightingale Foundation. 

The Korean Nurses Association said Marianne Stoeger and Margaritha Pissarek were honored with the biennial award during a virtual ceremony in a council's congress on Tuesday. It is offered to nurses with distinguished accomplishments in direct care, education, management or research. 

Stoeger and Pissarek are known as the "angels of Sorok Island" for their lifelong service caring for patients of Hansen's disease, or leprosy. 

After graduating from a nursing school in Innsbruck, Austria, they were dispatched to Korea through the Damien Foundation in the 1960s. Even after their official service term ended, they remained on the island as volunteers before quietly returning to Austria in 2005 when their health deteriorated.