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. Karin Fink is a palliative care physician and researcher at the McGill University Health Centre and the GMF-U/CLSC Parc-Extension. Her work is driven by an interest in community palliative care and is currently focused on a stream of research aiming to improve community palliative care for patients with serious illness. Her current project, “Improving end-of-life care at home by hearing the voices of bereaved caregivers with community participatory research,” was awarded funding in the 2024 cycle of the PCPCRC Seed Funding Competition.
Most people suffering from advanced serious illness want to be at home as much as possible, including at the end of life. Care at home for these patients requires the daily presence of informal caregivers and their involvement in care delivery, resulting in a combination of physical, emotional, and economic strains and increasing the possibility of caregiver burnout. Dr. Fink’s project seeks to understand, from the perspectives of bereaved caregivers, what home healthcare elements were essential to them when accompanying someone at end-of-life care at home, and to build on community participatory research methods to identify healthcare solutions which are tailored to caregivers and their communities.
She is also interested in promoting early community palliative care and care transitions from hospital to home. Currently, Dr. Fink and her hospital palliative care team collaborate with community palliative care teams to establish whether patients are being referred early enough, and how this referral process could be improved from the patient, caregiver, and clinician perspective.
Research was always something Dr. Fink knew she would want to take on alongside her clinical practice. “It was always clear to me that whatever I was going to focus on as a doctor I would also want to support my practice by doing clinical research,” she says. “When I then found the field of palliative care, that I was most interested in, I began to embark on this research journey as a clinician-investigator.”
The support provided by the Seed Funding Competition has been helpful to Dr. Fink in furthering her work as an early-career researcher. As she gets to know how funding and reporting work, she says, “the network has been guiding me in leading my laboratory. The critical review of the project, the possibility to present to the network, and the opportunities to network with other palliative care researchers across Canada have been invaluable.”
