About Clyde J. Ikeda, MD

I have been in private Plastic Surgery practice in San Francisco for the last 25 years specializing in the care of burn patients and for over a decade served as the Director of the Bothin Burn Center at St. Francis Memorial Hospital. I started at the Bothin Burn Center in 1983 as a plastic surgery resident. In addition, I built a private cosmetic and reconstructive practice and established an academic career with clinical professorships at both the University of California at San Francisco Medical School and Stanford Medical School. As of August 2011, I have been hired as Director of Regional Burn Services for Kaiser Permanente at South San Francisco. My primary goal is the care and overall well-being of burn patients. Burn medicine allows the unique ability to help patients from their initial injury through reconstruction, facilitating in their physical and emotional recovery. My aunt was severely burned as a child and died from her injuries. With today’s medical advances, she would have survived. She was a great influence in my medical practice. Burn medicine has advanced significantly and has evolved in the United States to a sophisticated science. Over the past 34 years, we have made huge transitions, where we can save people with 90 percent burn injuries. We can grow skin in culture and, in three or four weeks, have enough cultured epithelium to cover an adult male with extensive burns. That was experimental when I was a medical student; now it is standard care. Although I have just started at Kaiser Permanente, over the last 28 years I have volunteered with KP physicians at Hospital de la Familia in Guatemala. As the Medical Director and Vice President of Hospital de la Familia and with hundreds of volunteer health care providers, we have helped over 250,000 Guatemalans who would not otherwise have received medical and surgical care. Over the last 8 years, I have been the contracted doctor for KP at the Bothin Burn Center at St. Francis Memorial Hospital. This allowed me to work directly with KP physicians and professional health care providers. Now, I look forward to this opportunity to establish a KP regional burn service, which advances KP's vision “to be the model for quality health care in the nation by being the best place to work and the best place to receive care."