How Afya works

What Afya is

Afya is an independent directory of doctors at private clinics and hospitals across Oman. We list the doctors, the facilities they work at, and reviews from people who visited them. We are not a hospital, a clinic, or a booking service; we help you decide, and the visit stays between you and your doctor.

Where doctor data comes from

Doctor information on Afya comes from public sources: hospital and clinic websites and official listings. We record the source for every profile. If something is out of date or wrong, any doctor can claim their profile, correct their information, and add a bio — free of charge.

Afya lists doctors at private clinics and hospitals. For routine or subsidised care, a public health centre or a general practitioner is often the right first stop, and it can refer you onward to the right specialist.

How reviews work

Anyone who visited a doctor can write a review. Every review is read by a person before it's published — nothing goes live automatically.

We reject:

• Insults and personal attacks.
• Anything that violates privacy — yours or anyone else's.
• Reviews that aren't about a real visit.

What Afya never does

• Doctors cannot pay to hide, reorder, or remove reviews.
• We don't put ads between search results.

What you see is the same list a doctor sees.

How ranking stays honest

When you search, the order of the results is decided by a few things only: the doctor's rating once it rests on enough reviews, how many reviews they have, their years of experience, and their name. Nothing else moves a doctor up or down.

This is not just a promise in words. The part of Afya that builds the ranked list runs with no access to the billing records. It cannot see who pays for a plan, which plan they are on, or whether a payment is due. The money and the ranking are kept apart on purpose, so paying can never buy a better position.

And it is audited. Every time we change the code, an automated check reads the search and how the list is ordered, and it blocks the change if anything to do with payment or plan is used to order the results. If the check fails, the change cannot ship.

Verification is free for every doctor, at every tier, forever. A verified doctor shows a small verification dot so you know their details were checked, and verified doctors appear first in the list. Verification is earned through a document review by our team — it can never be bought, so a doctor's place is never for sale.

The search assistant

Afya's search assistant helps you find the right type of doctor. It does not diagnose, assess, or treat any condition, and it is not a medical device.

You describe your concern in your own words, and it points you to a type of specialist and a filtered list of doctors. It only ever chooses from a fixed list of specialties; it never names a condition, judges how serious something is, or gives medical advice. It cannot detect emergencies. If you have an emergency, call 9999 or go to the nearest emergency department.

It is a separate feature that only helps you start; it is never part of a consultation, and using it is always optional. The full directory is one tap away, and you can browse every doctor without it.