Ethics and Professionalism Courses for Nurses and Midwives in the UAE

The nursing course and the professionalism course are designed to be taken one after the other, about five hours in total. Here is how each is put together and where nurses in different roles should focus.

Ethics and Professional Conduct for Nurses and Midwives runs to nine teaching sections, and its order mirrors the questions a nurse meets in a career: who licenses you and what the 2023 law requires, how to reason through a dilemma on shift, consent and refusal, scope and delegation, medicines, advocacy and safeguarding, midwifery, boundaries and records, and finally complaints and remediation. Ward and intensive care nurses tend to find sections 4 and 5 the most immediately useful, because lesson 4.3 on refusing unsafe requests and lesson 5.2 on controlled-medicine custody and impairment describe situations they meet every week. Home care and school nurses should give extra time to lesson 2.2 on culture, family and faith and to lesson 3.3 on refusal and leaving against advice, since they often make those calls without a team nearby. Charge nurses and preceptors get most from lesson 4.2 on responsibility for the people you supervise and lesson 6.2 on speaking up in multinational teams. Midwives should treat section 7 as essential reading rather than an optional extra.

Professionalism in Practice for UAE Health Professionals is shorter, at seven sections over two hours, and is written for every licensed profession at once. That is useful for nurses precisely because so much of nursing conduct happens at the boundary with other professions: handing over to a doctor, querying a pharmacist, supervising an assistant. Section 2 covers honesty in licensing and renewal declarations and keeping your standing through gaps in practice, which matters to nurses who move between countries or take career breaks. Lesson 3.3 on civility, hierarchy and speaking up in mixed teams and lesson 4.2 on owning mistakes are the core of the course for most nurses. Section 5 on clinical systems, messaging and telehealth deals with the group chats and shared logins that cause many nursing confidentiality complaints, and lesson 6.2 looks at fatigue and your own health across long shift patterns.

The 2023 law covers health professions practised by people other than physicians and pharmacists, which includes nursing and midwifery. It is the first place an authority will look if your conduct is questioned.

What Article 8 requires

• Work only within your own licence and your facility's licence, and know the laws that apply to your work.
• Act with accuracy and honesty, put the patient's welfare first and never exploit a patient for unlawful gain.
• Follow the Ministry's code of ethics and uphold the dignity of the profession.
• Keep accurate records and keep the attending physician informed.
• Treat every patient with respect and without discrimination.
• Keep your skills current and train others when asked to.
• Report injuries, suspected crimes and communicable diseases.

What Article 12 forbids

• Tasks beyond your licence or scope, except to save a life in an emergency, and tasks your available resources cannot support.
• Practising in an unlicensed place unless the Executive Regulations allow it.
• Selling medicines or samples, promoting particular medicines or steering patients to a particular pharmacy.
• Giving forged documents or false information to the health authority or your employer.
• Marketing yourself, except as the Executive Regulations allow.
• Disclosing patient secrets learned through your work.

Article 13 sets the disciplinary scale: written reprimand, written notice, a fine of AED 1,000 to AED 50,000, suspension of all or part of the licence for up to six months, partial revocation, or revocation with removal from the register. No penalty may be imposed until you have been heard.

The law tells you what you must and must not do. The codes tell you how you are expected to behave while doing it.

• DHA-licensed nurses and midwives in Dubai work to the DHA Standards for Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, which took effect in September 2025. For nurses the standards on consent, confidentiality, communication, supervision and delegation, and reporting impaired colleagues matter most.
• MOHAP licensees work to the national Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct adopted by Ministerial Resolution No. 1448 of 2017. Article 8 of the 2023 law makes following the Ministry's code a statutory duty.
• DOH licensees in Abu Dhabi follow the national code alongside DOH documents such as the Patient Consent Standard and the Abu Dhabi Healthcare Information and Cyber Security Standard (ADHICS), which governs how you log in, handle screens and report suspected data breaches.
• SHA licensees in Sharjah work to the federal instruments the SHA lists, including Federal Law No. 6 of 2023 and the medical liability law.

Across all of them sits the Patient's Rights and Responsibilities Charter of 2021. Patients and families often quote it, especially the rights to know who is treating them, to privacy and to refuse treatment, so it is worth knowing well.

Under Cabinet Resolution No. 176 of 2025, renewal depends on meeting the minimum continuing development set nationally, you should apply at least 30 days before expiry, and you may not practise once the licence has expired until it is renewed. A nursing licence left unrenewed for six months after expiry can be revoked.

Shift work makes CPD uneven: a run of nights, then four days off, then a training day the unit cancels. Planning by quarter rather than by month copes better with that rhythm.

What nurses often count by mistake

The DHA publishes a list of activities that do not earn CPD points, and several are part of ordinary nursing life: unit induction and orientation, training on new electronic record software, internal departmental meetings, ward rounds and public awareness sessions you help to run. Product training from a supplier is excluded too. Keep these in your own development record if you wish, but leave them out of your CPD total.

Fitting ethics into the year

Article 8 of Federal Law No. 6 of 2023 expects you to keep your skills current and follow developments in your specialty, and professional conduct is part of that. Many nurses place an ethics or professionalism course in the third quarter, once the specialty share is secure, or link it to a change of role such as becoming a charge nurse, moving into home care or starting as a preceptor. Sharjah licensees update their CME record through the SHA points data service; doing it each quarter avoids a backlog at renewal. Your licensing authority decides how any learning counts towards your CPD or a requirement it has set.

These examples are illustrative composites drawn from common situations in UAE hospitals, clinics and home care.

1. The verbal order at 3 a.m. A doctor on the phone asks you to give a dose that seems high for the patient's weight. Declining or questioning an unsafe instruction and escalating it is part of working within scope, not insubordination.
2. The controlled drug count that is two ampoules short. The temptation is to recount until it balances. The course explains custody, reporting and why an honest discrepancy report protects you.
3. The patient who wants to go home. A competent adult may leave against advice, but the explanation, the written acknowledgement and your note all matter.
4. The relative at the nurses' station. A brother asks for test results "because the family decides together". Confidentiality applies until the patient agrees or a lawful exception applies.
5. The wound photo on a personal phone. Sharing an image on a messaging app to get a quick opinion can breach confidentiality and authority data rules, even with the face cropped out.
6. The colleague who smells of alcohol. The DHA Code expects you to report an impaired colleague where patients are at risk, and protects those who report in good faith.

Scope drift is one of the most frequent findings against nurses. It rarely looks dramatic: a nurse inserting a line she was trained to do abroad but is not privileged to do here, an assistant left to give medications, a home care nurse asked to adjust a regimen without a prescriber.

• Your licence category, your facility's licence and your privileges set the boundary. Article 12 of the 2023 law allows you to go beyond it only to save a life in an emergency.
• When you delegate, the DHA Code expects you to check that the person is licensed and competent for the task, to give clear instructions and to record the delegation in the patient's file.
• The medical liability law is written around physicians, but Article 37 applies the same liabilities to other health professionals as far as possible, so a nurse's error is judged by the same committees.
• Saying no safely means stating the concern, offering what you can do, escalating to the right person and documenting the exchange.

Midwifery carries legal rules that general nursing does not. The nursing course gives them a full section because the consequences of getting them wrong are serious.

• Who consents. The DHA consent guidelines allow a married woman to sign her own consent and set specific rules for reproductive health procedures. Abu Dhabi's Patient Consent Standard uses its own order for substitute consent. Know which applies in your facility before an emergency.
• Termination of pregnancy. Abortion is lawful only in the cases the law permits. Article 16 of the medical liability law was rewritten by Federal Decree-Law No. 18 of 2023, and Cabinet Resolution No. 44 of 2024 sets out the permitted cases, each with its own conditions.
• Informed choice in labour. Outside a genuine emergency, a competent woman's refusal of an intervention should be explained, respected and recorded, even when family members disagree. The course shows where the emergency exceptions in the medical liability law begin.
• Safeguarding around birth. Concerns about a newborn's safety or domestic violence engage reporting duties under federal child protection and domestic violence laws.

Medication administration is where a nurse's honesty is tested most often. When an error happens, what you do in the next hour usually matters more to an investigation than the error itself.

• Report through your facility's incident system. In Abu Dhabi the DOH Incident Reporting and Management Standard expects incidents to be reported within 24 hours and makes clear that the act of reporting should almost never, by itself, lead to discipline.
• Sentinel events are notified to the authority within 48 hours in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi, so your account will be read quickly and closely.
• Never alter or add to a record after the event without marking it as a late entry with the date and time.
• Tell the patient what happened, in plain words, with your senior colleague. Open Disclosure: Honest Communication When Care Goes Wrong works through those conversations.

Nurses are asked for reflections in many settings: a CPD portfolio, an annual appraisal, a preceptorship file, or after a near miss that never became a complaint. The simple question-based model, "What? So what? Now what?", suits nursing well because it keeps an entry short and moves quickly from the event to the change.

• What? Two or three sentences of fact: the setting, your role and what happened.
• So what? Why it mattered: the duty, standard or right involved, and the effect on the patient.
• Now what? What you will do differently, and how it can be seen.

An illustrative excerpt

This example is invented for illustration and is not a real case. A nurse on a surgical ward in Ajman, writing a portfolio entry after taking the nursing ethics course, might write:

Mistakes that weaken a nursing reflection

• Writing the "What?" at length and leaving one line for "Now what?".
• Reflecting only on feelings. They belong in the entry, but they are the start of it, not the whole.
• Choosing an event so minor that nothing could change, simply because it feels safe to write about.
• Naming the patient, bed number or date of birth.
• Promising a change that depends entirely on someone else, with no step of your own.

If you have received a complaint, been suspended pending investigation or been asked for a written statement, go first to the remediation courses for nurses and midwives. They start with Facing a Licensing Investigation: The Core Remediation Course and help you build insight and a remediation plan around the actual concern.

A grievance against a disciplinary penalty under the 2023 law must be filed within 15 days of notification, so check dates the day a letter arrives. Your facility's nursing leadership, your liability insurer or a UAE lawyer can advise on your own case. The core courses here are best used afterwards, to show focused learning on the standard in question. Only the authority that ordered training can say whether a course meets that order.

For nurses in acute wards, intensive care, emergency departments and home care, where most medication and deterioration incidents occur.

Long shifts, intimate care and close contact with families make boundaries and respect central to nursing. These courses cover gifts, social contact, chaperoning, non-discrimination and recognising and reporting abuse.

Nursing notes are often the most detailed account of what happened to a patient. These courses cover defensible entries, corrections, access to health information exchanges and what nurses can and cannot post online.

• Registered nurses in government and private hospitals across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and the Northern Emirates.
• Midwives in maternity units and birth centres, who need the reproductive health law in section 7.
• Home care and school nurses who work alone and make decisions without a team around them.
• Assistant and practical nurses, for whom scope and delegation are the main risks.
• Nurse leaders, charge nurses and preceptors who supervise others and handle the first stage of a concern.
• Nurses newly arrived in the UAE who need local rules quickly, such as the third-party rule for examinations and authority consent orders.
• Nurses and midwives facing a concern, who should start with the remediation courses for nurses and midwives.

Study online at your own pace on a phone, tablet or computer, with 12 months' access and progress that saves between shifts. Each lesson uses UAE nursing and midwifery cases with knowledge checks and reflection prompts. The final assessment has 20 scenario questions and you need 16 correct to pass. Your certificate of completion shows the course title, CPD hours and date, and the reflective account gives you a ready-made portfolio entry.

Three or more courses in one cart take AED 120 off the total. See every option in the course catalogue.