You are right that medicine is a wonderful career. However things have changed dramatically in the last year or so as the impact of Boris' lifting of the Resident Market Labour Test starts to impact.
Medicine is no longer a secure career. Newly qualified doctors now facing enormous competition for even basic entry level jobs, let alone training. Unless your DC knows what they want to do, and is very organised and driven, or if you are able to fund a later Masters (gap year) to prepare for the exams and gather together the super-curricular CV enhancements now needed, they may struggle. 20,000 of this year's group leaving F2 will be without training, whilst 100's if not thousands are competing for F3/house jobs.
The playing field is not level. I have a friend who is a very senior doctor in Asia with a lucrative private practice, and with a son at about the same stage as DD. He graduated elsewhere in Europe but she wants him to train in the UK, as she did, before returning home. UK speciality training still carries a good level of prestige and we are the only comparable country to give equal consideration to doctors from overseas. My friend's DC will have plenty of time to study for exams, with support and tutoring. He will be able to join his mother in some pretty impressive research. He will be able to enter competitions in his own country, which may not be as competitive as ones in the UK. He will have support writing his application. If he were in India he could take PLAB, which has a higher pass rate than the MLA that UK based doctors have to sit.
DD in contrast is working long and chaotic hours in a Deanery which still uses the old (2005) F1/F2 contract and where there is little scope for engagement in research. The current rotation is really tough. She expected this so before she started, she used her days off to batch cook. The NHS is a very different place to when others on this thread started their careers. The demands are huge and pastoral care is limited. Her rotation should have six F2s but the drop out rate is such that they only have three. Medicine is a lot less rewarding when, rather than treating people, you have to tell someone who has been waiting eight years for relatively straightforward, but life changing, surgery that they are still nowhere near the top of the list.
My friend comes from a culture where you put family first. She has no qualms in getting to know the system, and ensuring that her son does well. The British set the rules, and she follows them. If they are daft enough to have a system that disadvantages their own in favour of those who want their UK training in order to guarantee a lucrative career in private medicine elsewhere, so be it. (And yes, next time I visit I may well combine the trip with a thorough heath check, now being offered to visiting Brits by a commercial firm set up by someone else I know.)
The debate about prioritising UK graduates for UK training is live. https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/education-and-training/bma-leaders-to-debate-prioritising-uk-medical-graduates-for-foundation-programmes/
I am not sure I really understand the argument about the debt we owe to overseas doctors. Yes we do owe a historic debt to doctors from overseas who came here and stayed. However their children are likely to have gone to UK medical schools. Things are different today. Overseas doctors who have beaten the huge competition to gain training places may now be more interested in moving onto private health hubs, like Dubai and Singapore than to dedicate their careers to the NHS. I also don't get the "racism" argument. Other countries put their own residents first. Why can't we? And if we choose not to, we need to think carefully about whether we want to have so many graduating from UK medical schools. It is not fair to either the taxpayer or the young person to spend so much when the career path is so uncertain.
MY DD did not apply for training during F2. After two rotations, the speciality she thought she wanted to go into, is now her least favourite, and she has a far better idea of where she does want to work. She also realises that she is a work hard-play hard sort of person. After a 60 hour week she needs to get out onto a sports pitch, not least to build local connections. Those that are able then to hit the books are impressive, but it is normal that others do better by maintaining balance. She is only aware of a couple of her peers who have training. Sadly the brilliant locum, who was a huge support to both F1s/F2s and to newly arrived overseas doctors, did not get through and is now having to try again, effectively blocking the job that someone from DDs year might take.
Instead it looks like zero hours work with NHS Bank. Bank hourly rates where she lives are low, probably because of the over supply of young doctors. They are higher in a more rural trust about an hour's drive away. She then needs to pay her own insurance and mortgage (she really did want to build her career in a hard to recruit area) which she can do it she prioritises shifts with anti-social hours. If not she uses her intercalation (strong advice is to choose a course that allows for useful intercalations - DD studied medical engineering at Imperial) to switch career. Or Australia. The problem with Australia is that you are behind Australians in the queue for more sought after jobs and training and that, unless things change, it is very difficult to return to the UK.
The madness is that there are loads of vacancies. In a previous rotation a couple of DDs consultants went out of their way to tell her they thought she would make a very good clinician with good diagnostic and communication skills. Training selection is done nationally and the jobs in that Trust are relatively unpopular. The Doctor who has spent £30,000+ on a training academy in India to increase their chances of landing a training slot in the UK, or the Oxbridge/London high flyer who has burnt the candle both ends to put together the perfect CV, will wait for something better to come up. Why spend eight years in the back of beyond, with little research opportunity, no international recognition, and in one of the more failing parts of the NHS. As a result eight out of the sixteen training positions are vacant. Consultants are on call one night in four. They have a Physician's Associate but the training and the restrictive contract hours mean they are very limited in what they can contribute. As a result patients have to wait two years for an appointment even with an urgent referral. And frustratingly though consultants do what they can to encourage good F2s, especially those who want to stay in the area, they can't hire them.