Annual Martin Luther King Lecture Empowers Trainees to be Agents of Change

Held on Tuesday, Jan. 21, the 2025 Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture featured rising fourth-year medical student Neil Singh Bedi discussing “Actionable Steps for Creating Change: Empowering Trainees and Beyond.”
Bedi, a Zuckerman Fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government Center for Public Leadership, is pursuing a Master of Public Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His presentation before an audience of approximately 70 students, faculty and staff focused on how all people within healthcare systems – whether they are trainees or seasoned professionals – can effect meaningful change.
In introducing Bedi, Medical School Dean and Medical Campus Provost Karen Antman, MD, noted the close ties between King and BU, his alma mater.
“Dr. King led a group of individuals who believed that the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights applied to all Americans, and this academic medical center has been committed to high quality health care-for-all for a century-and-a-half, including social structures required for physical and mental health like housing, a healthy diet, education and more,” said Antman. “We can’t have a healthy population without access to the things that actually allow you to thrive and make progress.”

Bedi spoke of the hopeless resignation he hears from his colleagues – that they feel it’s not possible for an individual person working within a healthcare system to create change. He described the nature of systems-thinking, that systems are constantly changing and those working in them are part of that change.
“Central to all…the important social progress we’ve seen in the last couple of centuries is one simple idea: that individual people have the capacity to change systems,” said Bedi.
Some, said Bedi, might say that medical school is hard enough without rocking the boat; that it’s not their mission to be agents of change.
“But when we look at the systems that we have today, we hold the people who designed them 20 years, 50 years ago…accountable,” he said. “Twenty, 50 years into the future, we are the ones who are going to be held responsible.”
Bedi went on to describe a seven-step process for creating change, drawn from principles in his work across climate and health, health equity and human rights initiatives. He explained this theoretical framework with a real-world case study describing recent efforts by him and a group of his fellow medical students and faculty mentors to work with Boston Medical Center to curtail the practice by correctional authorities of leaving terminally ill prisoners in shackles right up to death, by recommending exceptions to correctional authorities for patients who posed no risk to themselves or others.
“We weren’t going to overhaul the entire corrections system…but we knew that our objective from Day One was that no patient should die in shackles,” he said. They assembled a team of medical students and some faculty mentors and formed the Stop Shackling Patients Coalition. They found the problem was entrenched, a policy handed down by correctional officers that, until a recent national advocacy campaign that led to legislative change, saw pregnant prisoners giving birth while chained to their beds.
In bringing interested parties to the table, Bedi’s team found it was important to include opposing voices. “Sometimes, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that the people who might philosophically disagree with you actually support what you’re trying to do,” he said. “There is no path forward in the American healthcare system that doesn’t include all of us.”
“The reason they are called entrenched practices is that things have been done again and again and again until someone comes along to change them,” Bedi said. And with new policies and protocols, comes the next critical step of implementing, sustaining and sharing the change beyond one’s own institution. “You have to make sure that whatever change you make, that you do it again and again until it becomes a part of the institution’s memory,” Bedi said.
Throughout the talk, he emphasized the unique role that trainees have in serving as agents of change.
“They are our systems to inherit,” Bedi said. “And as we begin to change our systems to do better and be better, we will come remarkably closer to a world, where all people can truly, be well.”
A recording of Bedi’s lecture is available here.