After initial happiness about Lincoln she’s starting to say she might redo ucat just in case she gets good A level grades and a much better ucat, and will then reapply to the unis she actually wanted to apply to in the first place - she keeps being told Lincoln is a uni for ‘thick people’ by the lovely kids in her grammar school. Obviously we keep telling her medicine is a totally different ballgame (and also what a snobby thing to say anyway).. but I really hope the offer holder day convinces her otherwise as I can’t deal with another year of this!!
This would be a horrendously risky thing to do. There is no guarantee at all that she'd be successful in getting a place at another medical school next year, even if she does have a better UCAT score. The only grounds for doing it would be that she'd rather do a non-medicine course at a more prestigious university than medicine at Lincoln.
Something we try to drill into medical students (or any other students, for that matter) in their first couple of years is the importance of judging the reliability of sources. In the hierarchy of reliable sources, some-snobby-kids-in-a-selective-school comes very close to the bottom, just above an official statement by the president of the United States of America. In any case, she will only be at the university for 2 years: she will be in hospitals and GP surgeries for most of the rest of the time.
is it really true that medicine is medicine and her chances of future employment (including abroad if needed) are not hindered by a non Russell group degree. although I think she’d actually get a Nottingham degree so maybe it’s indistinguishable.. she’s just getting cold feet about future work chances if she takes the offer.
The 2025 cohort is expected to be the last that receive University of Nottigham degrees. Lincoln intends to deliver its own MBBS programme from the 2026 intake (subject to GMC approval). I don't know what will happen to students who start the programme in 2025 but drop back a year as a result of failing a year or having health problems that force a temporary leave of absence. It will depend on the agreement they have in place with Nottingham whether those students graduate with degrees from Nottingham or Lincoln.
Which university you studied at is not a factor in selection criteria for either foundation training or any specialist training programmes. All UK medical students now do the same final exam, so they have all demonstrated the same learning outcomes at the same level. The additional factors that might come into play for postgraduate training posts include distinctions, prizes, research presentations/publications, etc. There are opportunities to undertake these in any medical school, although the laboratory-based opportunities might be greater in larger institutions. There will be opportunities to get involved in audit/service-improvement projects in any hospital trust, and many medical schools will have partnerships with local authorities (public health) and third-sector organisations that can host projects. (The relative disadvantage for UK-trained vs overseas-trained doctors for these criteria has been well aired in various threads. This is something NHS England and counterparts in the rest of the UK need to sort out: it doesn't come down to differences between medical schools within the UK.)
As others have said, some countries (notably Singapore) only recognise certain medical degrees from other countries. The USA is moving in something like the same direction but I think this is more for the purposes of making registering bodies in other countries provide information about their requirements & standards rather than as an attempt to reduce the number of foreign doctors. There's no obvious suggestion they would refuse to recognise a degree from a particular university: they would refuse to recognise any from the whole country if the registering body wasn't on its approved list.