Time is Everything: Wisdom From Safe Surgery Advocate and Ocular Melanoma Survivor Lindsay Brown

Minneapolis, Minnesota – Safe surgery advocate Lindsay “Linds” Brown believes that time is everything. Rather, our approach to time is everything.

“We consider time to be the villain in our story,” said Brown. “We spend time, we waste time, we kill time, we blame time for not doing the things that we love to do and seeing the people we want to see. But we have the power to approach time differently.”

The time it takes to prepare an instrument for sterilization, to package a robotic arm for safe storage, or to safely and effectively complete a major surgery – it all matters. It all speaks to what we see as important or worthy of our minutes on this earth.

Brown would know. She’s currently the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) of Healthcare HQ, the parent company of Beyond Clean, a keynote speaker and a birth and postpartum doula. In her career, she’s spent time as a sterile processing technician, a vendor representative, an SPD educator, and more.

So, instead of seeing time as an enemy, she travels around the country offering this critical reframe to healthcare professionals of all kinds:

“Time is the most renewable resource we have,” said Brown. “We wake up with a new bank of time every single morning. As people who work in the healthcare space, everything that we do is an effort to give our patients more time with their families and their loved ones. That’s extremely powerful.”

For Brown, this way of thinking isn’t just motivation for motivation’s sake. It’s a real revelation that occurred during a critical moment in her life. In 2022, Brown was diagnosed with an ocular melanoma and required an enucleation to remove the cancer from her eye.

At this point, Brown had worked in all kinds of healthcare spaces surrounding surgery, but this was the very first time she found herself as a patient on the table. The experience blew her world open.

“As I was lying there waiting to go under anesthesia, I wasn’t thinking about anything except I hope that the sterile processing technicians in this department had someone who geeked out about instrument cleaning and protection as much as I used to,” said Brown. “I thought, ‘I hope that all departments have that resource; that someone who’s going to take the seemingly annoying little detail and treat it like the big deal that it actually is.’”

“That was a major turning point,” continued Brown. “I was forced into this incredible perspective that not only encouraged me to take a step back and evaluate not only how I was sharing my time, but wonder: how can I encourage the incredible individuals in this industry to see that the work they do gives other people the gift of time. It’s been really cool to take that message and wave that flag through the industry as much as I can.”

Taking The First Step

Brown says that the first step in changing your relationship with time is first taking stock of where you are now.

“The mindset piece is huge,” said Brown. “A lot of the excuses that we make for ourselves are, I don’t have time for that, or it’s not the right time, etc. We use time as an excuse to not challenge ourselves or push ourselves forward. Once you acknowledge that you might be positioning time as the villain in your story, your awareness shifts. That shift in awareness is everything.”

One exercise courtesy of Brown: Next time you’re asked, “How long have you been in your role?” Stop before you answer. Instead of responding with how many years or months you’ve been in your industry or at your current organization, consider paying homage to other ways of quantifying the important work you’ve done.

For example: How many patient’s lives have you helped save in the last week? Now, multiply that by 52 weeks in a year, then by however many years you’ve been working.

“That is enough to make someone’s jaw drop,” said Brown. “Not only is that putting meaning to your work, but it invites human connection into your day by driving the conversation deeper. It’s a chance to allow someone into the nuance of what healthcare professionals really do, and sterile processing in particular.”

Indeed, a large part of Brown’s work outside of her public speaking involves advocating for recognition for the sterile processing profession.

“If I could, I would make sterile processing the most well-known department in the hospital,” said Brown. “Hopefully, by acknowledging SPD as a very important department, resources such as proper equipment, inventory, and space–tools technicians need to get their job done right–start getting allocated to the department.”

In the meantime, Brown is doing what she can to provide whatever resources she can within her power. At Beyond Clean, Brown recently launched an online forum called, Ask the Clean Freak, a place for sterile processing professionals to submit questions, which Beyond Clean Resident #CleanFreak Bobby Parker will answer publicly.

“If one person has a question, it’s a guarantee that multiple people also have the same question,” said Brown. “Sure, anyone can go on Facebook and ask questions, but they’re going to get twenty different answers from twenty different people. Our goal is to create a public forum for people to ask questions and receive a truthful, evidence-based answer.”

Keynote speaking and developing resources for sterile processing professionals only scratches the surface of the important work that Brown does. It may seem overwhelming to some, but for Brown, it’s the source of her energy.

“Whether it’s my doula work, where I get to work with families bringing new babies into the world, or whether it’s my work with Beyond Clean, where I get to help vendors bring their stories to life and to light for people in the hospital setting who need to hear it, or if it’s being on stage, connecting my story to people in the audience–all of it comes down to that through line of supporting people through an experience,” said Brown. “That’s what I do in all of those different roles, and that’s where the joy comes in. It’s been such an honor to pour into this industry, and I’m excited to do it for as long as I possibly can.”

SterileBits: The Time is Now

To learn more about Lindsay Brown and follow her work, visit her website here.

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