Locating non-working nurses in Japan: A feasibility study.
In order to examine feasibility and to describe characteristics of nurses who were not working as nurses, a questionnaire survey was conducted using channels of newspaper distribution. 70 cases responded, with an estimated response rate of 12%. Age distribution was unimodal with a peak in the 30s. This shape and the age distribution for working nurses obtained by our previous survey were mutually complementary. The result shows that such a method of data collection can be representative of the characteristics of nurses who are not working as nurses to some extent, and has some feasibility. At present there is no other way. However, in the near future, a license renewal system should be built, which would allow collection of information from whole nursing license holders.