New website helps support caregivers

The Aging in Place Essential Toolkit was featured in the Sampan newspaper, one of the largest bilingual Chinese-English newspapers in New England.

Ira Yellen knows what it is like to care for a family member. He spent more than a decade researching, vetting and managing in-home aides, skilled nursing and hospice care for his mother who lived to her 90s.

From this experience, Yellen found being a caregiver can be stressful and complicated.

“It is a silent stress,” he said. “It’s just always there.”

Yellen said in Massachusetts alone there are 800,000 unpaid family caregivers. Most of these caregivers are women, making up more than 80 percent of the caregivers.

“It usually falls upon a daughter,” he said. “If there isn’t a daughter or some female in the picture, that’s when you see a male become the caregiver.”