Coming from a tropical country, the cold weather in Edinburgh is my biggest challenge in discovering its numerous beautiful places. On the third day of the summer school of the Master of Family Medicine programme, the weather was a little bit warmer, and Ian from Kenya, with his passion for history and travel, took Tobias and me on a trip to discover one of the icons of Edinburgh: the Forth bridges.

Tania in front of the Forth Bridge, the oldest of the three bridges.

The Forth bridges are three majestic bridges linking the county of Fife and the City of Edinburgh, built over more than a hundred years. The oldest, the Forth Bridge, was constructed in 1890. This railway bridge was the world’s longest cantilever bridge when it opened, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. A second bridge was built to carry road vehicles in 1964, named the Forth Road Bridge. And a hundred years later in 2017, the Queensferry Crossing became the third bridge – the world’s longest three-tower cable-stayed bridge at the time of its opening.

The twilight scenery over the three bridges conveyed a story of connections: a connection of people, places, and times. Those connections reflected to me the journey of family medicine.

The previous evening, Professor Liz Grant invited us to find connections. The warmth of a shared diner became a story time of worldwide connections of friends, mentors, and family physicians around the world. These connections brought a young medical doctor from a developing country in Africa with no family medicine practice to learn from the home of the first professor of general practice, Dr Richard Scott.

To the first Forth Bridge, the continuous technological progress brought two additional bridges to adapt to the constant growth of the surrounding community. To us, progress in information and communication technologies makes a distance learning platform a global community where ideas, values, and skills are shared for the promotion of global health.

Group photograph taken at the 2024 Master of Family Medicine summer school.

The bridges reminded me of the lessons from the quality improvement projects conducted in the programme: in our journey of growth in family medicine we may find multiple obstacles. As a cantilever holding on one end to a solid pillar but open to the other end, the values that connect us shall bring support and strength as we navigate through the complexity of family practice while we build a sustainable future for the generations to come.

Images credits: Ian Kibet, Tobias Oluoch, Tania Gahama Ineza