Short answer: For the DHA exam for doctors, study internal medicine by system, in short blocks, with questions first and notes second. Candidate sources report that it is the largest subject, but DHA publishes no weights we could find, so the order below is a Meddex estimate. Check your title on the DHA site.
Why internal medicine takes the most time
Candidate guides report that internal medicine is the broadest subject on the physician paper, and that it also hides inside emergency, surgery and women’s health questions. A breathless pregnant woman is an obstetrics question and a medicine question at once. DHA lists content areas, but we found no percentage weights, so we treat the size of this subject as reported and the plan below as a Meddex estimate.
Meddex is independent and not connected to DHA. The DHA site and the Prometric candidate pages are the authority for your exam.
How to study internal medicine for the DHA exam
If you are asking how to study internal medicine for the DHA exam, start from questions, not chapters. Do a mixed set of 40 questions across the systems, mark each one right or wrong, and rank the systems by your score. Study the lowest one first.
Work one system at a time and keep each block to about two hours. A short block with a timed set at the end beats a long reading session, because the exam asks you to choose, not to recite.
A sensible order for the systems
This order is a Meddex estimate. It puts emergency-heavy systems first because they appear in many other subjects.
- Cardiovascular: chest pain, heart failure, arrhythmia and hypertension. Practise with the ECG guide.
- Respiratory: breathlessness, asthma, COPD, pneumonia and pulmonary embolism.
- Endocrine: diabetes emergencies, thyroid and adrenal problems. See diabetic emergencies.
- Renal and fluids: acute kidney injury and electrolytes, with the fluids guide.
- Gastrointestinal, neurology, haematology and infection, in the order your baseline suggests.
The skill the questions test
Reported question style is a short vignette ending in a next best step or most likely diagnosis. You usually know the disease. What decides the answer is one detail: a creatinine, a pregnancy, an allergy, a patient who is unstable.
Read the last line first. Then find the deciding detail, remove options that are unsafe for that patient, and choose between the two that remain. The single best answer technique walks through it.
A worked example
Example, invented for teaching. A man of 62 has crushing chest pain for 40 minutes and ST elevation in two contiguous leads. What is the priority? The deciding detail is time and the ECG, so the priority is urgent reperfusion through the local pathway, not waiting for a repeat test. A long list of causes of chest pain would be correct knowledge and the wrong answer.
Which guidelines to follow
We could not confirm which national or international guidelines DHA writes its items against. Do not assume one. Learn the safest common principle, such as recognise, stabilise, then investigate, and use the guideline your own practice follows as a base. Where two guidelines differ, a good item avoids the difference.
A sample week
Example for a doctor working full time, about 8 hours.
- Two evening sessions of 90 minutes: one system, 30 questions, then review.
- One short session of 30 minutes: errors from the week in your error log.
- One weekend block of 2 to 3 hours: mixed timed set of 50, then a second system.
Where to go next
Read the DHA exam for doctors overview for the process, the physician subject map for the other subjects, and practise in the question bank.
Common mistakes when studying medicine for the exam
Three habits cost doctors marks. The first is reading a whole textbook chapter and calling it a session. The second is studying only the conditions you see at work, so a cardiologist skips renal and an intensivist skips endocrine clinic problems. The third is learning treatment doses to the milligram when the question only asks which drug class or which step comes first.
A better test of a topic is whether you can explain, in two sentences, why the right answer is safer than the second best. If you cannot, you know the facts but not yet the decision. Write those two sentences in your log and read them again after a week.
What to put in your notes
Keep notes short and decision-shaped. For each condition write the one-line presentation, the first test, the first treatment and the trap. A page of these for each system is easier to revise in the last week than a folder of long summaries.
Say the trap out loud. A trap is the detail that makes the usual answer wrong, such as renal impairment or pregnancy. Naming it turns a vague memory into a rule you can apply under time pressure, and it is the part most candidates leave out of their notes.
Frequently asked questions
This article is general educational guidance, not official advice. Exam rules, fees and timelines are set by the Dubai Health Authority and the test provider and can change, so always confirm the latest details on their official channels.
Last updated .