Since 2009 Kevin Komisaruk has maintained a private practice as a bedside palliative care musician in both hospital and hospice, advocating for the relevance of advanced music-interpretation skills in developing performance-based therapeutic music interventions for pain and anxiety. He has performed for palliative individuals at Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital, Dorothy Ley Hospice, Hill House Hospice, Hospice Thornhill, Hazel Burns Hospice, Baycrest Hospital, and the Toronto East General Hospital. He has presented palliative care workshops for the Hospice Palliative Care Teams of the Central Ontario Health Integration Network, the Canadian Association for Music Therapy, and as a keynote speaker for the Calgary Instrumental Society.
At the University of Toronto he mentors students in re-visioning, re-configuring, and re-purposing traditional performance training for new contexts, of which palliative care is but one among many.
In 2011 he developed a performance-based palliative care music curriculum for the University of Toronto, which, in addition to providing applied masterclass training and guest lectures with clinical professionals in palliative care, surveys the foundational work of Balfour Mount, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, Eric Cassell, Philip Larkin, Diane Meier, Mary Vachon, and Cecily Saunders, among others. Since inception, these courses have seen the participation of over seventy stage-performance students at the Faculty of Music.