McKay McKinnon, MD, regularly receives national awards for his work as a Chicago-based plastic surgeon. But it’s the missionary work he performs worldwide in places like Belize, Romania and Honduras that is his passion. Since 1985, Dr. McKinnon has led surgical missions to Choluteca, Honduras, where he’s performed cleft lip and palate surgery on more than 500 children at no cost. “These people can wait in a long line at a government hospital in the capital, and eventually they’ll receive basic surgical care,” he explains. “But they wouldn’t receive the care any Chicagoan can get, and that’s what we try to deliver.”Dr. McKinnon became involved in this labor of love as a surgical resident at the University of Miami in the early 1980s. “I saw how my chairman, Ralph Millard, extended himself to foreign patients and surgeons in Jamaica.” And so, from 1982 to 1984, Dr. McKinnon made surgical missions to Belize at the invitation of the government.
