Lessons from the Forth Bridges : A Story of Connections in Family Medicine

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 program, the weather was a little bit warmer, and Ian from Kenya, with his passion for history and travel, took me and Tobias to a trip to discover one of the icons of Edinburgh: the Forth bridges.

The Forth Bridges are three majestic bridges linking the town of Fife and Edinburgh built over more than a hundred years. The oldest, the Forth Bridge is an Unesco World Heritage site, the first longest cantilever bridge, constructed in 1890. The Forth Bridge being a railway bridge, a second road bridge was built in 1964, named the Forth Road Bridge. A hundred years later in 2017, the Queensferry Crossing bridge became the third bridge as the world longest three-tower cable-stayed bridge.

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 of the 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.

The bridges reminded me of the lessons from the quality improvement projects conducted in the program: 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