Anyone treating patients in Dubai must hold an individual licence from the Dubai Health Authority. Not a clinic licence — a personal one, tied to that doctor, that specialty and that facility. It is public, it is free to check, and it takes about two minutes.

Very few patients ever check. That is worth changing, because the licence answers questions that a website cannot: whether the person treating you is registered at all, whether the title they use is the one the DHA actually granted them, and whether they are licensed at the clinic where you are being seen.

What the licence number tells you

A DHA licence number looks like 17891743-011. The first part identifies the professional and stays with them for their career. The suffix after the hyphen identifies a specific licence — a doctor who has worked at several facilities will have several, and only one of them is current at the clinic you are visiting.

This is why "DHA licensed" on its own means little. The useful question is narrower: is this doctor licensed, in this specialty, at this facility, right now?

How to check, step by step

1. Open the Dubai Health Authority website and go to the Sheryan section, then Dubai Medical Registry → Professionals. No account or login is needed — this is the public part of the register.
2. Search by the doctor’s surname. Names are transliterated from Arabic and other languages, so try variants: Artem and Artsem, Egor and Yahor, Alawi and Alalawi. If a search returns nothing, the spelling is the most likely reason.
3. Open the professional’s card. Check four things: status (it should read Active), facility, designation, and the licence number.
4. Compare the designation with the title used publicly. This is where discrepancies usually appear.

The four things to compare

Status

Active means the licence is valid now. Anything else — expired, suspended, cancelled — means the person should not be treating you.

Facility

A doctor may hold licences at more than one facility, and the register’s list view often shows only one of them. If the clinic you are visiting does not appear at first glance, open the full card rather than concluding anything: the licence count on the card shows how many licences exist, and the detail view lists them all.

Designation

The DHA grants a specific designation: General Practitioner, Specialist, or Consultant, followed by a field — for example Specialist Dermatology or Consultant General Surgery. A doctor may not publicly use a title the DHA did not grant. If a website describes someone as a dermatologist and the register says General Practitioner, that is a real discrepancy, and it is worth asking about.

Licence number

The number on the card should match the number the clinic publishes. If a clinic does not publish licence numbers at all, you can still find the doctor by name — but publishing them is a reasonable thing to expect.

What the grades actually mean

The DHA grade is not a quality ranking; it reflects qualifications and documented experience.

• General Practitioner — a licensed doctor without a recognised specialty qualification in that field.
• Specialist — holds a recognised specialty qualification.
• Consultant — the senior grade, requiring substantial additional experience.

A General Practitioner may be entirely appropriate for a routine consultation or an injectable treatment. What matters is that the grade is stated honestly and that the treatment falls within what that grade is permitted to do. Consultation fees in Dubai are commonly tied to the grade, which is another reason to know it before booking.

If something does not match

Ask the clinic directly — there are innocent explanations. A licence may have been renewed recently and the register may lag. A name may be transliterated differently. A doctor may hold two designations, so that a title combining them is legitimate.

What is not an innocent explanation is a specialty in the public description that does not exist in the register at all. If that is what you find, and the clinic cannot explain it, that tells you something useful before you commit to treatment.

Our own licences

Every doctor at ELEMENTAL has their DHA licence number published on their page on this website, so you can check any of them against the register without asking us for anything. We think that should be normal practice rather than a distinguishing feature.

If you find a discrepancy on our pages, tell us and we will correct it.

A note on clinic licences

Facilities are licensed separately from the people working in them, and the two are not interchangeable. A licensed clinic may still host an unlicensed practitioner, and a licensed doctor may work at a facility not licensed for the procedure being performed — surgery in particular requires the facility itself to be approved for it. If you are booking an operation, it is reasonable to ask what the facility is licensed to do, not only who is performing it.