Chelsea Hagopian, DNP, APRN, AGACNP-BC

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Thank you for your interest in my e-portfolio!  I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself: My name is Chelsea Hagopian, and I am a nurse practitioner in the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery, and I hold a doctorate of nursing practice in health systems leadership.  

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I started my career in nursing approximately 7-years ago, but my love of nursing began many years earlier.  I was very fortunate to grow up in a very close-knit Southern family.  My grandparents, Papa and Nannan, played a very big role in the family, as well as the larger, metro-Atlanta community: I share this because we all wanted to be exactly like either Papa or Nannan when we grew-up.  Nannan is an operating room nurse by training (Crawford Long Hospital), and I know from about the age of 15 that I wanted to follow precisely in her footsteps.  

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So, when I graduated from my BSN program, I began my nursing career in the operating room at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital as a circulator and scrub nurse.  It was through this job where I discovered a passion for the field of Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery.  I started circulating several breast reconstruction cases for a brilliant plastic surgeon, Dr. Grace Ma, and recognized that these surgeries aligned perfectly with what I love about nursing: whole-person care.  Reconstructing an amputated breast after mastectomy or restoring symmetry following a lumpectomy addressed both addressed the physical aspect of care, but also the psycho-social, as breasts are commonly an essential component of a woman's identity, that is, her femininity.  After about a year of working closely with Dr. Ma, I realized that I wanted to participate in the entire care journey of breast reconstruction patients, so I returned to my alma mater, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University, to become a nurse practitioner with the intention of working directly with Dr. Ma.  A few months before completing my MSN, my husband and I were relocated to Los Angeles for his Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery residency at USC.  I flew back and forth to Atlanta while finishing my degree, after which I began working in private practice with a plastic surgeon in LA to continue with my plan to work with breast reconstruction patients.  About a year after I started working as a nurse practitioner, I began to learn the aesthetic side of plastic surgery-----mainly at the request of the breast reconstruction patients I cared for who wanted to explore the more "fun" side of plastic surgery.  I became very interested in nonsurgical aesthetic procedures and the gap they were able to fill in surgical practice.  

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 In 2017, I cofounded Maintenance, a nonsurgical aesthetics clinic, and actively work in collaborative practice with a board-certified plastic surgeon.

 

As a doctor of nursing practice, I have ongoing quality improvement work focused on improving the effectiveness of the informed consent process in aesthetic plastic surgery.  During my doctoral program, I established an evidence-based development process model for creating certifiable patient decision aids to replace traditional informed consent documents in this patient population.

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I maintain membership in several professional organizations, including the California Association for Nurse Practitioners, Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society for Nursing, International Society of Plastic and Aesthetic Nurses, American Nurses Association, and the American Organization for Nursing Leadership.