How to Verify a Gulf Nursing Licence: the Public Registers, Authority by Authority

A nurse in Kochi is sent a photograph. It shows a Dubai Health Authority licence in the name of the consultant who has been arranging her job, a hospital letterhead, and a request for a deposit. Everything about it looks right, because everything about it was designed to look right.

The part almost nobody uses is that most of this is checkable, by her, for nothing, in about a minute. Health regulators publish registers precisely so that the public can tell a licensed professional from someone claiming to be one — and across the Gulf those registers cover facilities as well as people, which is the check that matters most when the thing you are being sold is a job.

This guide is the map of what is actually public, authority by authority. It is purely administrative — no exam content, no clinical material — and it exists because three quite different questions get muddled together, and each one has its own tool.

Three questions people ask as if they were one

“How do I check a DHA licence?” is three questions wearing one coat, and answering the wrong one is how people end up reassured by the wrong evidence.

• Is this person licensed? That is a public registerquestion. You need their licence number or their name, and you need the authority's own search.
• Is this document genuine? That is a document verification question, and it is a different tool — usually a barcode or reference printed on the certificate itself. A register cannot tell you whether the PDF in your inbox was edited.
• Where has my own application got to? That is an account question, answered inside the portal you applied through, behind your login. It is not public, and no register will show it — an application that has not yet produced a licence produces no register entry at all.

Keep them separate and the rest of this page is straightforward. Blur them and you will conclude that a register is “broken” because it does not show an application that has not finished, or that a document is genuine because a person with the same name exists.

Five moments when a nurse should actually run these checks

These are not hypotheticals; they are the points in the journey where the cost of not checking is highest.

• Before you accept an offer. Look up the facility, not the brand name. A hospital that cannot be found in its own regulator's facility register is the single loudest warning sign in this market, and facility search is public in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
• Before you pay any intermediary. If someone presents themselves as a licensed practitioner, consultant or clinic owner, that claim is checkable in seconds. See what agencies may legitimately charge you.
• When a document arrives as an image. Licences, Good Standing certificates and registration letters issued by an authority generally carry their own verification handle. Use it rather than trusting the picture.
• The week your own licence is issued. Read your entry the way a future employer will: is your name spelled as it is on your passport, is the category right — Registered Nurse rather than Assistant Nurse — and is any specialty title the one you were assessed for? A wrong category is far cheaper to fix now than at renewal. See the name-mismatch guide and the specialty-title guide.
• After you change employer. In the UAE your licence is tied to the facility you practise in. After a move, confirm that the register shows the new facility — not the old one, and not a blank. Registration and activation covers why that link exists.

Dubai (DHA): the most complete set of public tools in the Gulf

Dubai publishes three separate things, and they line up almost exactly with the three questions above. If you are checking anything in Dubai, this is the order to use them in.

1. The Dubai Medical Registry — browse by criteria

The Dubai Medical Registry is an open search covering both professionals and facilities, filterable by licence type, category, speciality, area, facility, language, nationality and gender. For a nurse, the two useful modes are looking a facility up by name before accepting an offer, and confirming that your own entry exists and reads correctly once your licence is live.

2. Verify a professional by licence number

Where the registry browses, the Verify Professional License/Registration Status service answers a direct question. In the DHA's own words, it “helps to verify the status of any registered or licensed Healthcare Professional under DHA by entering the Professional's DHA Unique ID or License Number” — one field, either identifier. That is the check to run when someone has given you a number and you want to know whether it belongs to them and is still live.

The page carries one caveat worth reading before you conclude anything: “For Professional license history and verification before year 2019, please contact Dubai Health Authority through gsc@dha.gov.ae.” Older history is a human enquiry, not a lookup.

3. Verify the document itself

The service that catches forgeries is the quiet one: Verify Documents exists to “verify service output documents issued by the Dubai Health Authority”, using the barcode number and PIN printed at the bottom of the document. This is the one to reach for when an agent sends you a scan of a licence, or when an employer asks you to prove that a Good Standing certificate is real. A forged image can copy a barcode; it cannot make the authority's own system return a matching record.

Abu Dhabi (DOH): the facility check is the valuable one

The Department of Health collects its public lookups on one Lists & Tools page and runs them through TAMM, the Abu Dhabi government services platform. Two matter here.

• Find a Medical Professional — described by the DOH as a tool “created to help you find a doctor in Abu Dhabi”. Read that literally: it is a patient-facing directory built around doctors, so treat it as a directory rather than as the definitive nursing register.
• Search with Facility Licence Number— enter a facility's licence number and get its licensing status and registration details. This is the check that protects you before you sign, and the number is something any genuine employer can hand over without hesitating.

Saudi Arabia (SCFHS): validity now, status separately

The Saudi Commission for Health Specialties runs a service for Checking Health Practitioner's Registration Validity, which in its own description “allows verifying the professional registration validity of an SCFHS health practitioner”. Registration is the stage that follows classification, so a practitioner who has been classified but not yet registered is not expected to appear — which is exactly the distinction the classification and registration guide exists to explain.

Your own file is a different service: SCFHS provides a separate check on a request's status in Mumaris+. If you are waiting on classification, that is the page to watch — not the validity checker, which will keep telling you nothing exists until it does.

Bahrain (NHRA): a published list rather than a lookup

Bahrain takes the opposite approach and simply publishes the roll. The NHRA's List of Licensed Professionals page carries separate files for medical practitioners, dental practitioners, nurses, allied health professionals and pharmacists — spreadsheets containing, in the NHRA's wording, the names of healthcare professionals who hold a valid licence. The nursing file was dated the month of our review. There is also an open data portal.

The trade-off is worth understanding. A downloaded list is a snapshot: someone licensed the day after publication is genuinely licensed and genuinely absent from your copy. Check the file date before drawing a conclusion from a name that is missing, and re-download rather than reusing last month's file.

Qatar (DHP): a practitioner search, once you know where it moved

Qatar has a working lookup, and the reason so much advice says otherwise — including, until this review, ours — is that the regulator changed address. The Qatar Council for Healthcare Practitioners was restructured as the Department of Healthcare Professions (DHP) under the Ministry of Public Health, and the old qchp.org.qa domain no longer resolves at all. Anything still pointing you there is pointing at nothing. The regulator now lives on dhp.moph.gov.qa.

Its Search Practitioners page lets you filter by profession — Nurse is one of the options alongside physician, dentist, pharmacist, allied health and complementary medicine — and search by first, middle or family name, by licence number, or by place of work from a list of licensed facilities. That last field is the one worth using on an offer: it tells you whether the person is registered at the facility they say they work for. The DHP adds the caveat that it is not responsible for practitioner data published on other websites, which is the regulator's own way of saying what this guide says throughout — check the source, not the screenshot.

Northern Emirates (MOHAP): two directories, not none

Until this review this guide told you that MOHAP publishes no practitioner register and no facility check. That was wrong, and it was the most costly thing on the page, because MOHAP is the authority for Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Fujairah and Ras Al Khaimah — the emirates where a nurse is most likely to be offered a job by someone she cannot place. MOHAP publishes both checks, and links them from the About menu on its own site rather than from its services catalogue, which is why they are easy to miss.

The professionals directory

The medical professionals directory is a browsable roll rather than a single-record lookup. You can filter it by Medical type — and one of the five options is Nurses And Midwives — or narrow further by Medical title, where the published list includes Registered Nurse, Registered Midwife, Nurse Practitioner, Critical Care Nurse, Neonatal Nurse, Pediatric Nurse, Mental Health Nurse, School Nurse, Ambulance Nurse, Assistant Nurse and Assistant Midwife. There are also Nationality, Specialty and Gender filters and a free-text search box. Each entry shows a name, nationality, gender and a status such as Active. It runs to hundreds of pages, so it is the register itself and not a highlights reel.

What it does not give you is a licence-number lookup, and the reason is worth knowing: both directories state that their content is retrieved from Sharik, the UAE's open-data platform. These are open-data publications, so the fields are the fields open data carries, and publication lag is a real possibility — a nurse licensed recently may not be listed yet. Read an empty result here more cautiously than you would an empty result on Sheryan.

The facilities directory

The medical facilities directory is the one to use on an offer. It searches by free text and filters by Emirate — Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Ras Al Khaima, Umm al-Quwain, Fujairah and Ajman as MOHAP spells them — and by Specialty, and each result carries the facility name, its emirate, its specialties and directions to it. If a recruiter names a clinic in Ajman or Fujairah, this is where you find out in a minute whether the clinic is a licensed health facility at all.

Separately from both, MOHAP publishes a verification form for evaluation certificates. That is a document check rather than a register — useful if you are holding a MOHAP-issued certificate and need it confirmed, and no use for checking a stranger.

Where the public trail runs out

Two authorities are left, and the honest answer for both is that we could not find a public lookup — stated here with what we actually read, so you can tell a genuine gap from a page we failed to find:

• Oman.The Ministry of Health's Health Practitioners Registration e-Service describes registering and listing practitioners who want to work in Omani institutions, and the account behind it lets you submit and track your ownapplication. It does not describe a lookup anyone else can run. OMSB's Verification & Equivalence of Health Professional Certificates section is likewise employer-initiated, through the e-Equivalency system — the employer applies, not the public.
• Kuwait. The Ministry of Health has a Medical License Registration service listed on the Kuwait Government Online portal (e.gov.kw) — that much we can confirm. The service page itself refuses our requests, so we will not describe how it works. What we will flag is the trap in the advice around it: a great deal of it tells you to “check your Kuwait nursing licence status online”, which describes an account you log into to see your own record. That is a useful thing and it is not a public register — it cannot tell you whether the person emailing you is licensed. Do not read one as the other.

For both, verification runs through the employer and the ministry, which is slower and involves asking a human being.

Where no register exists, the substitute is not a third-party “licence check” site — those are guessing too, and several charge for it. It is the authority's own contact channel, listed on the official portals directory.

What is public where

What a register cannot tell you

Registers are good evidence and poor proof, and knowing the difference keeps you from over-reading a result in either direction.

• Absence is not fraud. Publication lag, a licence issued last week, a name transliterated differently from the spelling you typed, or a category you did not expect will all produce an empty result for a real person. Vary the spelling and try the licence number before you accuse anyone.
• Presence is not a job. A licensed facility can still run an unlawful recruitment process, charge fees it should not, or have no vacancy at all. The register tells you the building is real, not that the offer is.
• It is not a scope ruling.What your licence category permits you to do is set by the authority's standards, not inferred from a directory line.
• A screenshot proves nothing.If someone sends you their register entry as an image, run the search yourself, from a link you found on the authority's own domain. The domain test in the portals guide is the prerequisite for everything on this page: a fake register on a fake domain is a cheap thing to build.

Four checks before you accept a Gulf nursing offer

• Ask for the facility licence numberand look it up on the regulator's own site. One minute, no cost.
• Look up any individual who is asking you for money and claiming a professional licence.
• Verify any documentyou are sent through the issuing authority's verification tool, not by eye.
• Check your own entry the week your licence is issued, and again after any employer change — name, category, specialty title, facility.

The bottom line

The Gulf's licensing authorities have already done the expensive part: they publish enough for a nurse to check a professional, a document and — most usefully — an employer, without paying anyone or asking permission. Dubai publishes all three, Abu Dhabi publishes the facility check that matters most before you sign, MOHAP publishes both a nursing roll and a facilities directory for the Northern Emirates, Saudi Arabia publishes registration validity, Bahrain publishes the nursing roll outright, Qatar publishes a practitioner search — and only in Oman and Kuwait is the honest answer that you will have to ask. None of it takes longer than the message you were about to send asking a WhatsApp group whether the offer looks genuine.

Official sources

• DHA Sheryan — Dubai Medical Registry
• DHA Sheryan — Verify Professional License/Registration Status — the source of the quoted service description and the pre-2019 note.
• DHA Sheryan — Verify Documents — barcode and PIN verification of DHA-issued documents.
• DOH Abu Dhabi — Lists & Tools
• TAMM — Find a Medical Professional (DOH)
• TAMM — Search with Facility Licence Number (DOH)
• SCFHS — Checking Health Practitioner's Registration Validity
• SCFHS — Checking request status in Mumaris+
• NHRA Bahrain — List of Licensed Professionals
• NHRA Bahrain — Open Data
• MOHAP — medical professionals directory— filter Medical type to “Nurses And Midwives”. Filter lists above quoted from the snapshot archived 1 March 2026.
• MOHAP — medical facilities directory — the Northern Emirates employer check, snapshot archived 10 March 2026.
• MOHAP — evaluation certificate verification
• Sharik — UAE open data platform — named on both MOHAP directories as the source of their content.
• DHP Qatar — Search Practitioners
• DHP Qatar — home (formerly QCHP)