Qatar DHP Nursing Exam 2026: 150 Questions, 50% Pass Mark, Blueprint

Qatar’s nurses are licensed by the Ministry of Public Health’s Department of Healthcare Professions (DHP) — the body many nurses still call QCHP, its former name. Before licensing, a Registered General Nurse or Registered Midwife sits a Prometric qualifying exam: 150 multiple-choice questions with a 50% cut score. That figure matters, because several nurse-recruitment sites print 60% or “60–65%”, which is the pass mark for doctors, dentists and pharmacists. This guide sets out the exam from DHP’s own pages — format, blueprint, the books DHP lists — and what DHP does not publish.

DHP Qualifying Examination page; blueprint (2023); Prometric.

Two details are genuinely unclear. The duration is printed as 3 hours on DHP’s exam page and Prometric’s page, but as “150 MCQs, 3 ½ hours” in the blueprint document; pace for the shorter figure — 3 hours, about 72 seconds a question — and check the duration on your Prometric booking confirmation. And DHP does not say whether scores are raw or scaled, whether wrong answers are penalised, or in which language the exam is set. On a raw count, 50% of 150 is 75 correct answers — but that is arithmetic, not a DHP statement.

Adult nursing alone is 61 questions — two in every five. Maternal–child nursing is the second block at 44, which surprises nurses who have spent years on adult wards and last studied obstetrics and paediatrics in college. Fundamentals is 30 questions and leadership 15. A study plan that simply mirrors the blueprint puts roughly 40% of the time on adult nursing and 30% on maternal–child.

The list is a guide to the level and the source of truth, not a reading list to finish. The practical use is to settle disputes: when two question banks give different answers on a procedure, the textbook DHP names is the one the exam is written from. The patient-safety section is worth noting too — it has no row of its own in the blueprint, so those questions most likely sit inside the four main areas.

For the Registered Midwife exam DHP lists a separate set of references: Green’s Maternal Newborn Nursing Care Plans, Brucker and King’s Pharmacology for Women’s Health, Schuiling and Likis’s Women’s Gynecologic Health, a text on CTG interpretation and fetal heart monitoring, Mayes’ Midwifery, two NCLEX-style maternal–newborn review books, and handbooks on professionalism, ethics and patient safety. With intrapartum care worth 60 of 150 questions, labour management, fetal monitoring and obstetric emergencies deserve most of a midwife’s time.

DHP sends candidates to Prometric’s online booking page for the State of Qatar DHP exams. DHP names one test centre — in Doha, at the Al Emadi Business Center on C Ring Road — and Prometric’s own “Locate” search lists others. Whether the Qatar nursing exam can be taken at Prometric centres in India could not be confirmed from any official page, because Prometric’s seat search sits behind a CAPTCHA; check it yourself on Prometric’s site before planning travel. Whether DHP must issue an eligibility number before booking is also not stated by DHP.