It is of particular importance to nurse manpower planners to determine the likelihood and time-scale of return to service of nurses who have temporarily withdrawn from the labour force. Such behaviour is common in female dominated professions and is referred to in the nursing literature as being in ‘limbo’. In this paper we develop non-parametric, parametric and network models to describe the distribution of stay in ‘limbo’ and estimate the probability of return to service. These models are fitted to data from the Northern Ireland nursing service. It is inherent in the problem that the data are statistically incomplete. This must be taken into account in the statistical methods used to estimate the various model parameters.