DHA Nursing Exam Syllabus (2026): Blueprint & Reference List

Search for the DHA nursing syllabus and you will be sold it — a PDF, a course, a bundle of “latest questions”. Almost none of those pages mention that the DHA publishes its own blueprint, free, with an entry for every licensed title: the exam code, the coverage areas, and the actual textbooks the questions are written from.

This guide tells you where that document is, what its current edition lists for each nursing title, and how to build a study plan around it. It is a process and study-logistics guide only. It names the references DHA names; it does not summarise, teach or reproduce a single line of their clinical content.

The document you actually want

It is called the DHA Healthcare Professional Licensing Assessment Guideline (Computer Based Testing), and it is published on Sheryan. It is not a study pack and it is not for sale. It is a directory: you pick your professional category, then your title, and you get a single page covering

• the exam duration and number of questions;
• the exam code— the string you will match when booking, and the fastest way to check a seller is talking about your exam and not a different title's;
• the fee and the pass score;
• the exam coverage — the domain headings the paper is built from;
• the references — the named texts the content is developed against.

The guideline also states that all exam content is developed and validated by subject matter experts and updated on a frequent basis. Hold on to that sentence; it comes back at the end of this guide.

What the current edition lists for nursing titles

Nurses and midwives are their own professional category, with three entries. In the May 2026 edition all three share the same shape — a three-hour appointment, 150 multiple-choice questions, a USD 240 fee and a 50% pass score — but they are not the same exam, and the midwifery entry in particular is built from an entirely different reference list.

Two things are worth noticing before you plan anything around that table.

The nursing coverage headings are deliberately broad. Four headings across a 150-question paper is not a topic list — it is a map of the whole of general nursing. Anyone selling you a tighter “syllabus” than DHA publishes has invented the extra precision. That is exactly why the reference list below matters more than the headings do.

The three hours are not three hours of questions. The guideline is explicit that the stated duration includes the registration and the process introduction, not just the exam content. Plan your pacing on that basis, and see the test-day guide for what the check-in itself involves.

The reference list is the real syllabus

For both Registered Nurse and Assistant Nurse, the current edition lists twelve references. These are the books DHA names — reproduced here as a bibliography, exactly as a library catalogue would, so you can go and find them:

• Kozier and Erb's Fundamentals of Nursing: Concepts, Process and Practice — Berman & Snyder (Pearson)
• Brunner and Suddarth's Canadian Textbook of Medical-Surgical Nursing — Day, Paul, Williams, Smeltzer & Bare (Lippincott)
• Physical Examination and Health Assessment — Jarvis (Saunders Elsevier)
• Mosby's Pharmacology in Nursing — McKenry, Tessier & Hogan (Mosby)
• Skill Checklists for Taylor's Clinical Nursing Skills: A Nursing Process Approach — Lynn & LeBon (Lippincott)
• Wong's Nursing Care of Infants and Children — Wong & Hockenberry (Mosby)
• Foundations of Maternal-Newborn Nursing — Murray & McKinney (Saunders Elsevier)
• Introduction to Critical Care Nursing — Sole, Klein & Moseley (Saunders Elsevier)
• Essentials of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing — Townsend (F. A. Davis)
• Community Health Nursing: Promoting and Protecting the Public's Health — Allender & Rector (Lippincott)
• Nutrition Essentials for Nursing Practice — Dudek (Wolters Kluwer / Lippincott)
• The ANA Code of Ethics, and a nursing technician blueprint

Three practical consequences follow from that list, and they are the reason it is worth reading before you buy anything.

• It maps the headings back onto something concrete. “Fundamentals” means Kozier and Erb's. “Adult Nursing” means Brunner and Suddarth's. “Unit Management & Leadership” sits alongside a code of ethics rather than a clinical text — which tells you the leadership, delegation and ethics questions are real, not filler.
• Every entry says “Latest Edition”. DHA pins no edition numbers, so a much older copy is a risk you are choosing to take, not one the guideline sanctions.
• Midwives have a different list entirely — perinatal and midwifery texts, not the general-nursing set above. A Registered Midwife revising from a Registered Nurse pack is revising the wrong books, and the exam codes in the table are the quickest way to catch that before you pay.

You will never see your score — plan for that

This is the part that most changes how a sensible person prepares, and it is stated plainly in DHA's Manual for Professional Assessment (Oral/CBT), version 1.1: the applicant “will be notified of the result (PASS or FAIL) and no further details (such as the score or review of topics) will be provided”. The CBT guideline repeats it — the applicant's score will not be shared.

So the feedback loop you might be counting on does not exist:

• There is no “I just missed it”. A fail two marks short and a fail thirty marks short look identical in Sheryan. You cannot tune your revision against a number you are never given.
• The domains are weighted, and the weights are not published. The manual says DHA calculates the result from the number of correct answers and the weighting of each domain — but no weighting appears anywhere in the guideline. Treat all four coverage areas as examinable rather than gambling on which one carries the paper.
• The result comes from DHA, not the centre. Pass or fail is issued only by DHA through Sheryan, uploaded electronically within two working days per the manual. Nothing you see at the test centre is your result.

Building a plan from it

None of this needs a course. The blueprint gives you the structure; the rest is scheduling and honesty about attempts.

1. Start from your own title's page, not a generic syllabus

Open the guideline, find your title, note the exam code, and write the coverage headings and the reference list down. That page — not a forum post, not a seller's landing page — is your scope document. If a study product cannot tell you which exam code it is for, it is not a product for your exam.

2. Work backwards from a date you can actually book

You cannot schedule until Sheryan has issued your Eligibility ID, which sits at the far end of the credentialing track — registration, documents and Primary Source Verification. Build the study calendar around the realistic timeline for those stages rather than around a date you have not yet earned the right to pick.

3. Respect the attempt count from day one

The Unified PQR allows a total of three attempts, and the manual is blunt about the consequence: failing the third blocks you from reapplying for a DHA licence for two years. There is no waiting period between attempts and no refund for a missed one, which makes a “let me just see what it's like” sitting an expensive idea. A third fail is not quite the end — the current manuals set out a fourth attempt on request, and a fresh set of three after a further recognised qualification or two years of licensed practice — but every one of those routes costs you months you did not have to spend. Read the attempts and retakes rules before you book the first one, not after.

4. Rehearse the shape, not just the content

It is 150 single-best-answer multiple-choice questions on a supplied computer, in one sitting, in English, with no translator. Practising in that shape — timed, on a screen, without looking anything up — is worth as much as another pass through a textbook. If English is the part you are unsure of, the English-requirement guide covers what the authorities ask for.

5. Check whether you needed to sit it at all

A licence and Good Standing Certificate from certain countries, or an NCLEX pass, can exempt a nurse from the exam entirely. It is worth ten minutes with the exemption criteria before you commit three months to revision.

The “real exam questions” market

Every nurse preparing for this exam is offered recalled or leaked questions at some point. Three separate reasons to walk past them, in increasing order of seriousness.

• They may simply be stale. DHA states its exam content is updated frequently. A recall bank is, by construction, a snapshot of a paper that has already moved on.
• Prometric's test centre regulations prohibit it. Communicating, publishing, reproducing or transmitting any part of an exam, by any means, is barred outright, and Prometric reserves the right to invalidate scores where it believes exam security was compromised.
• DHA treats it as professional misconduct. The assessment manual bars applicants from sharing information related to an assessment session — questions included — and states that a detected cheating attempt is unethical professional conduct that results in a Fail and may lead to the applicant being blacklisted. You are applying to a regulator for permission to practise. That is a bad file to have a conduct note in.

The lawful, and frankly more effective, version of the same instinct is to practise against material written from the references DHA names — which is what the twelve titles above are for.

The bottom line

There is an official DHA nursing exam blueprint, it is free, and it is more specific than most of what is sold on top of it. For the Registered Nurse exam the current edition lists code RNT0312, four coverage areas — Unit Management & Leadership, Fundamentals, Maternal–Child Nursing and Adult Nursing — and twelve named reference texts. You will get back a bare pass or fail with no score, plus a Learning Outcome letter that is the only diagnostic in the whole process. Three attempts, then a two-year door with a narrow, request-based way through it.

Download the guideline for your own title before you plan, spend nothing until you have read it, and keep the official portals directory to hand — the lesson there, that there is one real source and everything else is a reseller, is the lesson of this page too.

Official sources

• DHA Healthcare Professional Licensing Assessment Guideline (CBT) — the blueprint itself, published on Sheryan. Edition dated May 2026 at the time of review; the source for every exam code, coverage area, duration, fee, pass score and reference list above.
• DHA Manual for Professional Assessment (Oral/CBT), version 1.1 — the process rules: pass/fail-only results, domain weighting, the two-working-day upload to Sheryan, the Learning Outcome letter, the three-attempt limit and the confidentiality and misconduct clauses.
• DHA Sheryan portal — where your Eligibility ID is issued and where the result is released. Covered in the Sheryan guide.
• Prometric — DHA testing programme — the booking site DHA itself directs applicants to, and the source for test centre requirements and procedures.
• Prometric — Test Center Regulations — the rules you agree to on the day, including the prohibition on reproducing or disclosing exam content.