Our founder spent ten years as a certified nursing assistant in hospitals and skilled nursing facilities around Boston. She was good at the work and she was exhausted by the system around it: twelve clients to a shift, no time to learn anyone's name properly, and family members standing in hallways trying to get five minutes of straight information from anyone who would stop walking.
The turning point came on a Sunday in Wakefield. A neighbor's mother had been discharged after a fall with a page of instructions nobody had explained, nine medications in three different containers, and a bathroom with no grab bar. The family had spent the weekend googling. Within two hours of sitting down at that kitchen table, the medications were sorted, the hazards were flagged, and the daughter cried — not because anything dramatic had happened, but because someone had finally slowed down long enough to explain.
A Touch of Comfort by Iris was built to make that afternoon repeatable. We started with two caregivers and a promise that no client would be scheduled without being known. Today we serve families throughout Wakefield, Boston, and the surrounding communities, with a roster of CNA and HHA-certified caregivers supervised by a registered nurse — but the intake process is unchanged. We still visit before we quote, still write the plan with the family in the room, and still match caregivers by temperament rather than by whoever happens to be free.
We have also stayed deliberately local. Growing beyond the communities our coordinators actually live in would cost us the thing families value most: caregivers who arrive on time, know the neighborhood, and can be at the door within hours when something goes wrong. Our aim is not to be the biggest agency in Massachusetts. It is to be the one your family recommends without hesitation, at the moment another family needs it most.
