Short answer: DHA's guideline lists four content areas for a Registered Nurse: unit management and leadership, fundamentals, maternal-child nursing and adult nursing. It publishes no weights. Third-party guides add pharmacology, ethics, mental health and community health. Use the current DHA guideline and build your list from it.
What the DHA exam syllabus for nurses looks like
People often expect a syllabus to be a long list of chapters. For the DHA licensing exam, DHA's guideline gives broad content areas for each title and says nothing about depth. That is why two candidates can read two different “syllabuses” online and both be partly right.
Meddex is independent and is not connected to the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) or Prometric. DHA's own four areas for a Registered Nurse are unit management and leadership, fundamentals, maternal-child nursing and adult nursing, in its CBT guideline of September 2026. The longer list below comes from third-party candidate guides, which disagree in places, so it is labelled reported or marked as our own addition. Registered Midwife is a separate exam with its own nine areas.
Topic areas that sources report
These areas are the ones third-party guides name most often. Treat them as a starting map, not as the official list, which has only the four headings above. Sources differ on the exact headings.
- Professional nursing practice: ethics, law, patient rights, consent, confidentiality and conduct. Reported.
- Pharmacology and medication safety, including calculations. Reported.
- Adult medical and surgical nursing, including long-term conditions. Reported.
- Maternal, newborn and paediatric nursing. Reported.
- Mental health nursing. Reported by some sources only.
- Community and public health nursing, such as screening and vaccination. Reported by some sources only.
- Anatomy and physiology as the base for the areas above. Reported by some sources only.
- Infection prevention and control. Our own addition. We did not find it named as a separate area, but it runs through safe practice.
- Emergencies, patient safety, communication and documentation. Our own addition, for the same reason.
What is not confirmed: weights and depth
DHA does not publish how many questions each area carries, although its Assessment Manual says results use the weighting of each domain. Pages that give an exact split for each topic are, as far as we can tell, estimating. Depth is also unclear, so the safest rule is to be able to apply a topic to a patient, not to recite it.
The Meddex question bank groups questions into ten domains that we built to cover the areas above and the safety topics we added. That grouping is our own planning map. It is not DHA’s list and it carries no official weights.
Build your own syllabus checklist in four steps
A checklist you wrote yourself is more useful than any list you copy, because it shows your gaps.
- Open the current DHA guideline for your title and copy the content areas word for word into a sheet.
- Add a column for each area with your confidence from one to five, scored honestly after a short timed set.
- Add the weakest three areas to the first two weeks of your plan. Add the rest in order of confidence.
- Re-score every two weeks and cross out an area only when you score well on mixed sets, not after one good day.
A sensible order to study the areas
Start with the areas that sit underneath the others: safety, medicines and infection control. They appear inside questions on almost every other area, so improving them lifts your scores everywhere. Then move to adult care and emergencies, then maternal and child health and mental health, and finish with ethics and law, which suit short daily review.
The older guide on exam subjects by profession shows how the shared areas apply to other titles. The DHA exam for nurses page covers format and preparation in more detail.
Check the other facts too
The syllabus is one of several facts worth checking at the source. Question count, time and pass mark are also misquoted by some sites. The page on facts for the nurse exam lists what DHA says and where other sites differ.
When to revisit the list
Check the DHA guideline again about a month before your exam and in the final week. If the content areas have changed, update your sheet and move the new items to the front. Note the date you last checked next to the list, so that you always know how fresh it is.
A worked example of one syllabus line
Take the reported area “infection prevention and control”. A vague plan says “revise infection control”. A useful plan breaks it into tasks you can finish and test.
- Hand hygiene and when to use gloves, gowns and masks.
- Standard precautions compared with contact, droplet and airborne precautions.
- Cleaning, disinfection and sterilisation, and who is responsible for each.
- Sharps injuries and what to do in the first hour.
- Isolation, outbreaks and reporting to the infection control team.
If you searched for the nurse exam topic list in other words
People look for the same thing under many names: the DHA nursing exam topics, the DHA nurse exam subjects, the DHA licensing exam content outline, or simply what to study for the DHA exam as a nurse. All of them point to the same document, the current DHA guideline for your title. Use that document, not a forum summary, as the base for your sheet, and write the date you checked it at the top.
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 .