DHA Dubai CPD: Points by Category and the Online Cap That Changed

Dubai Health Authority requires continuing professional development for licence renewal, and a licence cannot be renewed without it. The current rules sit in the Manual for Licensing Healthcare Professionals, version 1.3, issued and effective 18 July 2025 (DHA/HRS/HLD/MA-2), with earlier detail in DHA's CPD guideline HRD/RAS/PRU/003. Between those two documents one limit has changed in a way that materially alters how CPD can be delivered in Dubai.

The change: online CPD went from 30% to 100%

The 2014 CPD guideline capped it tightly — "only 30% of the CPD points required per year can be gained from the online CPD programs". The 2025 licensing manual takes the opposite position: up to 100% of the target can be earned through online programmes, provided they relate to the professional's specialty (sections 18.5 and 18.7).

For a DHA-licensed professional that removes the need to assemble a mixed portfolio of in-person and online activity. For a provider delivering online CPD it changes the addressable share of a licence-renewal requirement from under a third to the whole thing. If you are working from guidance written before July 2025, you are working from the wrong cap.

Points required, by category

Annual CPD points are set by professional category: Physicians and Dentists 40; Pharmacists 20; Nurses 20; Allied Health Professionals 10; Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine professionals 10.

Where a professional holds more than one category, CPD is calculated against the category with the highest requirement, whether they work full-time or part-time (section 18.2).

Multi-year renewal scales the target

DHA licences can be renewed for one, two or three years (section 15.2), and the CPD target scales with the period: doubled for two years, tripled for three. A physician renewing for three years therefore needs 120 points, not 40 (sections 18.9 and 18.10).

That is worth planning around rather than discovering at renewal. A three-year renewal is administratively convenient but front-loads a substantial CPD obligation, and sections 15.5 and 18.3 are unambiguous that a licence cannot be renewed where the required CPD has not been achieved.

The specialty split

At least 70% of points must relate to the professional's own specialty, with up to 30% available for general professional development (section 18.4). Combined with the online rule, the practical requirement for an online provider is specialty-relevant content — general interest material can only ever address the smaller share.

What does not count

The CPD guideline excludes a list worth knowing because it covers activity people assume qualifies: routine ward rounds, departmental meetings, induction, software training and basic product training. Accepted categories are open live activities across multiple organisations (courses, seminars, symposia, meetings, conferences), live internal activities within one organisation (case studies, grand rounds, journal clubs, internal teaching, peer consultation), self-study including accredited distance learning with verifiable self-assessment, and publication in peer-reviewed journals.

On timing, the guideline requires activities to have taken place no earlier than 12 calendar months before the renewal application, and extra points carry forward into the next year only where they were earned inside that window. Where points are unmet, HRD approval can allow the shortfall to be added to the following year's requirement.

The accreditation question, stated honestly

This is where the two documents do not line up, and anyone planning to sell CPD into Dubai should resolve it directly with DHA rather than infer it.

The 2014 guideline is restrictive: online completion certificates are accepted only from CPD accrediting bodies recognised by DHA; recognised UAE bodies listed include DHA itself, the Ministry of Health, Health Authority–Abu Dhabi, the College of Medicine and Health Science at UAE University, and the University of Sharjah; and critically, CPD held in the UAE must be reviewed and accredited by local authorities, with international accreditation not considered for those events. Regional and international accreditors are listed separately in its Appendix II. HRD reserves the right to approve or reject any educational event and its assigned point value.

The 2025 licensing manual, by contrast, does not state that CPD must come from a DHA-accredited provider. Whether that reflects a deliberate relaxation or simply a difference in scope between a licensing manual and a CPD guideline is not something the published documents settle. The prudent reading for a provider is that recognition still matters for online certificates, and that a UAE-held event still needs local accreditation — but confirm it, because the commercial model depends on the answer.

Where Dubai sits among CPD regimes

DHA is a points-based regime with a specialty ratio and a hard renewal gate, which puts it closer to CORU's credit model for allied health professionals in Ireland than to a reflective model like NMC revalidation, where the emphasis falls on reflection and confirmation rather than counting. A comparison of the Irish healthcare regulators shows how differently the same obligation can be framed.

For firms with wider obligations in the Emirates, UAE anti-money-laundering duties on accountants and auditors as DNFBPs covers the other main compliance track. And for a contrasting model where accreditation sets the funding level rather than eligibility, see Singapore's IBF schemes. Our CPD courses are accredited, which is the starting point for any recognition conversation.