Raffa Joins Pediatric Alliance’s Greentree Practice
By Vanessa Orr

When Chelsea Raffa, CRNP, FNP-C, joined Pediatric Alliance, PC, this past July, she was already familiar with the practice that provides comprehensive primary and specialty care (asthma, allergy, immunology and endocrinology) to infants, children and adolescents. Not only did she spend clinical time there as a nurse practitioner student, but she was also, at one point, a patient.

“I’ve come full circle; this is where I came to see the doctor while I was growing up,” laughed the Greentree native. “Now I’m working with the doctors who used to take care of me.”

After graduating from Penn State University with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 2013, Raffa earned her Master of Science in Nursing from Carlow University in May of this year. She is licensed as a Certified Registered Nurse Practitioner (CRNP) and a Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP-C), certified by the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners. While attending school, Raffa worked in the emergency department at West Penn Hospital, where she still works on weekends to keep up her emergency room skills.

“I had the opportunity to work at Pediatric Alliance this past summer as part of my nurse practitioner training, which allowed me to get to know some of the patients and become more familiar with the practice,” she added. “This made it a much easier transition.”

As a full-time nurse practitioner, Raffa will be seeing patients from newborns to adolescents for both sick and well visits. “One of the areas that I’m really focused on is preventative health and wellness, including immunizing children to prevent illnesses,” she said. “I’m also looking forward to providing a lot of patient and parent education.”
To this end, Raffa talks with new mothers about their children meeting developmental milestones, though she cautions against taking those goals—or the news that other children have reached those checkpoints first—to heart.
“What I see with a lot of new moms is the tendency to compare themselves or their children to others,” said Raffa. “They measure how their newborns are feeding, eating, sleeping and developing in relation to other children, but the fact is, every child develops differently.

“It can be hard not to do, especially with social media—it seems like everyone shares everything anymore,” she added. “But they shouldn’t feel bad when they see that their niece is feeding X number of times a day, or that someone else’s child started walking at 9 months when their child started at a year—developmental milestones are important, but they are not the end all be all.”

One of the things that Raffa says she most appreciates at Pediatric Alliance is the focus on individualized care. “During one-on-one visits, we can see how a child is progressing and see if there’s anything we need to do to meet their specific needs,” she said. “For example, some children may need formula supplementation in addition to breast feeding; it all depends on how the child is growing.”

Raffa says that she is looking forward to helping children and their families thrive. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to provide quality pediatric care to this great community where I grew up,” she said.

For more information, visit Pediatric Alliance at www.pediatricalliance.com or call 412-922-5250. The Greentree office is located at 969 Greentree Road, Ste. 100, Pittsburgh, PA 15220, and the practice also has 16 other locations.

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