a rule · United Arab EmiratesLicensing a clinic in the United Arab Emirates

Health facility and professional licensing in the UAE is split by emirate and by free zone rather than run federally. In Dubai the Dubai Health Authority licenses both, under Law No. (6) of 2018 Concerning the Dubai Health Authority, through the Sheryan system — described by the Authority as the "Digital gateway for registering and licensing healthcare professionals and facilities in Dubai" — with a public register. Dubai Healthcare City, a free zone, is regulated by its own authority. Abu Dhabi and the northern emirates run their own arrangements.

A federation that regulates health by emirate produces a licensing map a foreign patient cannot read from the outside, and the free zone makes it worse. A clinic in Dubai Healthcare City and a clinic a kilometre away on Oud Metha Road are licensed by different bodies under different rules, and both are in Dubai.

Law No. (6) of 2018 is the Authority's current constituting law and repeals contradicting provisions in other legislation. Licensing of health facilities sits with the Authority; Sheryan is where it happens and where the register is published.

The free zone publishes its own counts: 168 clinical facilities, 10 hospitals and 4,425 healthcare professionals, across Phase 1 on Oud Metha Road in Bur Dubai and Phase 2 at Al Jaddaf, regulated by the Dubai Healthcare City Authority.

Inference — the practical consequence for someone checking a clinic before travelling is that there is no single national register to check. The question is not whether a UAE clinic is licensed but which body licensed it, and the answer determines where a complaint goes. That is the same fragmentation a patient meets in any federal system, and the Emirates is the one where the fault line runs through a single city.

Dubai also sends its own nationals abroad for treatment under a separate bylaw of the same Authority, which is on its own record here.

Sheryan carries a public search for professionals and for facilities, and a separate Dubai Medical Registry directory. A licence is held by the individual clinician as well as by the premises, and both are searchable.

What a reader would have to establish: which regulator covers the address; whether the individual clinician's licence covers the procedure being sold; and whether the facility category — outpatient clinic, day surgery centre, hospital — matches the operation. A clinic licensed for outpatient dermatology and selling general-anaesthetic surgery is a licensing question before it is a clinical one.

As of 17 September 2026 the Dubai Health Authority's Sheryan register is public and searchable. Dubai reported more than 691,000 international health travellers in 2023 through its media office, a count of arrivals rather than of people.