medicine help

Only you can answer that.
I feel like the new generation of young people want this work-life balance. They want time to do the things they love and to be perfectly honest I feel as though they don't really want the 'vocational' type of job that medicine and veterinary certainly used to be.
It's not that well paid and it's not respected by the public any longer in them main. In fact, I think the BMA are partly to blame for that and the wider NHS made changes to cause a wide-spread de-professionalisation of medicine, too.
If medicine is all you see and hear and think then it is probably the profession for you but you need to be well aware of what you are entering into. Nights, weekends, holidays, these are the realities of healthcare today- someone, somewhere has to do those shifts. You need to decide if that juice is worth the squeeze especially if you are interested in a medical or surgical route because you'll be doing these shifts long after foundation is completed.
I can appreciate this is a hard decision for most people at the GCSE/A level stages because the majority of you will have no yardstick or way to gauge what is worthwhile vocationally or in terms of a career. There are many ways to earn a good and productive living, it just depends on what your priorities are and what you can tolerate or what you enjoy.

I can't agree more! I'm not a medic, but my child is applying (first medic in family if he's lucky), hence why I'm here. My husband and I are in the professional roles/careers and I think there's a lot of 'push back' from the current generation (not a wrong thing though) to have some good semblance of a good work-life balance. My child is academic - and had very good GCSEs and predicted A level scores. Scored in the top decile for UCAT. He's very self-motivated though so I'm supporting him as much as I can (e.g. getting train tickets and that sort of thing) but I can't help with the studying bit because that has to be driven by him. I also can't help with the medicine bit since no one else in the family is a medic. Sometimes I wonder whether doing something else might be better but I live in hope that the training places thing and other things down the line will get sorted by the time my child finishes (if he's so lucky to get in).

Only you can answer that.
I feel like the new generation of young people want this work-life balance. They want time to do the things they love and to be perfectly honest I feel as though they don't really want the 'vocational' type of job that medicine and veterinary certainly used to be.
It's not that well paid and it's not respected by the public any longer in them main. In fact, I think the BMA are partly to blame for that and the wider NHS made changes to cause a wide-spread de-professionalisation of medicine, too.
If medicine is all you see and hear and think then it is probably the profession for you but you need to be well aware of what you are entering into. Nights, weekends, holidays, these are the realities of healthcare today- someone, somewhere has to do those shifts. You need to decide if that juice is worth the squeeze especially if you are interested in a medical or surgical route because you'll be doing these shifts long after foundation is completed.
I can appreciate this is a hard decision for most people at the GCSE/A level stages because the majority of you will have no yardstick or way to gauge what is worthwhile vocationally or in terms of a career. There are many ways to earn a good and productive living, it just depends on what your priorities are and what you can tolerate or what you enjoy.

I don’t think the issue is that the new generation lacks vocation, it’s that medicine no longer gives much back for the level of sacrifice it demands. In the past, people accepted nights, weekends and holidays because medicine offered stability, status and a clear path forward. This trade-off has largely disappeared.
Pay has fallen in real terms, progression is unclear and highly competitive, and FY2s can finish training with essentially no job security. It’s hard to commit your life to a profession when the profession doesn’t offer basic security or respect in return. Wanting work-life balance isn’t a lack of vocation, it’s a rational response to how the system now works.
If we want medicine to feel vocational again, then the conditions need to support that: fair pay, clear progression and professional respect. Without those, it’s no surprise NHS retention keeps dropping.