Meet the Team: Chrissy Massaro

No matter where you are in your journey, Confident Care Academy has a growing team of mentors & experts to help you along the way. Here’s a chance to get to know a little bit about us! Over the next few weeks, we will be introducing you to each of our team members in this section. I’ll start with myself!

Chrissy Massaro MSN, CRNA

I’m a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist who specializes in cardiac and high risk obstetric anesthesia in New York City. I started my CRNA career in 2017 in Philadelphia at both Penn Presbyterian Medical Center and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania where I was able to gain valuable experience in trauma and cardiac anesthesia before moving to New York in 2022.

My first nursing job was in the Cardiovascular ICU at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 - it was a challenging unit with a large volume of critically ill patients and a steep learning curve. As a new grad ICU nurse, I was completely unprepared for the high level of acuity and high expectations I encountered there. This left me with feelings of extreme anxiety before every shift, rumination about my day when I came home, and pervasive self doubt in my abilities, even though I knew deep down that I was a smart and hardworking person capable of learning anything.

I spent hours combing through the internet and textbooks to self teach all of the foundational concepts that I only understood on a surface level in order to provide better care to my patients and feel less anxious at work. Although learning on my own was extremely helpful and did ease my anxiety with time, I was frustrated by the lack of resources designed for nurses- everything was either designed for physicians- far too detailed and abstract to be useful to me or designed for patients- far too simple and unhelpful for providing care.

It wasn’t until I got to CRNA school that everything I had wanted to understand finally clicked. Graduate level physiology was the piece of the puzzle I truly needed as an ICU nurse to perform my job with competence. It turns out I’m not imagining it either- in many European countries critical care nursing actually requires a master’s degree! No WONDER I had such a gap in understanding. This sparked the vision to bridge the gap for nurses- that’s where the idea for Confident Care Academy was born!

I stumbled my way onto TikTok in 2019 and found myself giving out advice about nursing and anesthesia on the internet daily. That’s when I knew it was time to make a bigger, better system for nurses to access the knowledge that they deserve. It had been some times since I was an ICU nurse- I knew that I needed a partner who was still in the ICU to help me execute this vision. In 2022 I asked Anna Jobe to team up with me and that is when Confident Care Academy rolled out its first educational lecture series. The rest is history!

I am so grateful to have you on this journey with me. You motivate me every day to keep learning more and to keep driving our profession forward. Whether your goal is to be a confident ICU nurse, a CRNA, a NP, or anything in between - my hope is that CCA supports you and inspires you daily, in the same way you all inspire me.