With over 100 investigators, healthcare providers, trainees, community and policy stakeholders, and patient and family partner members, the Pan-Canadian Palliative Care Research Collaborative is a network of practice-focused research groups aiming to produce high-quality palliative care research.
Our members have a passion for research and are looking to be actively involved in a palliative care research network. They come from many disciplines and include patients, caregivers, trainees, policy makers, clinicians, and researchers.
Dr. Michael Bonares is a clinician–researcher whose work focuses on making sure that people living with serious non-cancer illnesses have access to high-quality palliative care. His clinical and research interests are closely aligned, with a particular emphasis on how palliative care is delivered to populations that have historically been under-served.
Dr. Bonares’ research spans several areas of non-cancer palliative care, including end-stage kidney disease, ALS, and dementia. In patients with end-stage kidney disease, he examines palliative care delivery among those receiving maintenance dialysis, as well as among individuals who pursue non-dialysis treatment pathways. Similar questions guide his work in ALS, where he studies the impact of palliative care services on patients and caregivers.
Another area of focus is clinical prediction modelling. Dr. Bonares is developing methods to estimate survival in people living with dementia, with the goal of supporting timely access to end-of-life services when they are most needed.
Health equity is a central lens across his research program. Dr. Bonares investigates how equity stratifiers—such as immigration background, socioeconomic status, rural residence, and language—may influence access to palliative care in Ontario. His work aims to identify structural barriers that prevent some patients from receiving appropriate care near the end of life.
Dr. Bonares entered palliative care through internal medicine, a pathway that shaped his focus on non-cancer illness. He was part of an inaugural cohort of internal medicine residents eligible to apply for an internal medicine–specific palliative care fellowship. Through his training, he frequently cared for patients with conditions such as heart failure, end-stage kidney disease, and dementia, and became aware of the significant gaps in palliative care services for these populations. This experience motivated both his clinical practice and his research agenda.
His first formal involvement with the Pan-Canadian Palliative Care Research Collaborative (PCPCRC) was through the Seed Funding Competition. His funded project brings together his interests in non-cancer palliative care and health equity by exploring how language barriers influence difficult conversations about palliative care, and whether certain groups are less likely to receive these services. “Having conversations about palliative care at the end of life are really hard,” he explains, “and that’s even when people speak the same language as their patient.”
For Dr. Bonares, the main benefit of participating in the PCPCRC has been the opportunity to learn from other researchers. On an informal level, he describes a “path of osmosis” through exposure to how projects are developed and discussed. “The way that more experienced members talk about their projects,” he says, “helps me understand how to operate as an early career investigator.” He has also found PCPCRC formal educational sessions helpful, including recent workshops on grant writing. These, he says, have provided training not formally taught in his medical or graduate education.
Dr. Bonares is the Research Lead of the Division of Palliative Medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Scholarly Lead of the Division of Palliative Medicine at the University of Toronto. Read more about his work here.