Healthcare Hero: Marcia Day Paulk

Hailey Heseltine
ECB Publishing, Inc.

Marcia Day Paulk is a Registered Nurse with a plethora of experience in her field and an abundance of loving concern for all those in her care. Though she currently works as a Registered Nurse Consultant for Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, which is more of an office job than it is working directly with patients, she has served in many different healthcare positions before, including ICU, hospice and nursing homes.
“The majority of my career has probably been with home healthcare,” she explains.
She was inspired to begin her career as a nurse because of her grandmother, who she was very close with. When her grandmother fell ill, Paulk saw the loving care the nurses provided for her and felt deeply touched. She had always liked helping people, but she never considered nursing before. When she realized that the health care field could be a way for her to touch people's lives just as she had been touched, she decided it was a career worth pursuing.
“I realized that this was what I was meant to do... and I'm so glad, because it's been so rewarding,” she says.
Paulk graduated from Aucilla Christian Academy in 1986, then Tallahassee Community College (TCC) in 1988, and finally received her bachelor's degree in communications from Florida State University in 1990. Her desire to become a nurse brought her back to school, and she graduated again from TCC and headed straight into the field in 1999. She started off her career in the cardiac care unit at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital (TMH), which she said established a pattern for the rest of her work.
She always made it her priority to bond with patients, because she believes that people should only work in healthcare if they have genuine love and compassion for their patients. However, establishing bonds with patients, while being the most rewarding aspect of her job, is also the hardest.
The healthcare field comes with inevitable loss, which she is forced to confront often, especially in the cardiac unit and in nursing homes. For someone like Paulk, who values compassion and caring above all else, it is a difficult reality to grapple with. Coping with that, she says, is the toughest challenge the field has brought her.
“I just have to take comfort in knowing I did the best I could,” she explains.
The threat of loss never stops her from connecting with her patients and giving them the best loving care she possibly can, since she believes those qualities are essential in the characterization of an effective healthcare professional.
“That's the most important part,” she says. “You have to put heart and soul in it. If you don't, you're going into the wrong field.”
Despite its challenges, she describes nursing as a very rewarding profession. It is very challenging and requires great fortitude physically and mentally, but the sacrifice never outweighs the rewards. The feeling of seeing patients' conditions improve and hearing them express their genuine gratitude is easily her favorite part of her work.
“Just having people express their appreciation...I can't even explain how it makes me feel,” she says.
Though she may not be working with patients as much as a Registered Nurse Consultant, Paulk still cares for her elderly mother and expresses a desire to get back into serving patients part-time through at-home care. Whatever direction her path into the future of her career turns, Paulk is eager to follow it.
When she is not hard at work, she loves to spend time with family and friends. She is a single mother, and she is proud to report that one of her children is enrolled in TCC, and another is dual enrolling there despite still being a high school student.
She also loves to sing, act and dance. She has been in several local community theater productions with Monticello Acting and Dance Company, and hopes to be in more in the seasons to come.
Though her job requires that she spend most her time in Tallahassee, she wishes to express her earnest appreciation of Jefferson County and its residents.
“I love Jefferson County,” she says. “I can't wait 'till I can come back home.”