Dr D'Rozario moved from his hometown of Adelaide to the area two decades ago shortly after finishing his OMF training and now felt it was time for a fresh start.
"I'd been in an associateship in the Illawarra region since 1989 which had served me well but I now wanted to move in a different direction," Dr D'Rozario said, "so I decided to establish a new practice on my own.
"We started looking around the local area for somewhere suitable and my wife actually found the premises. It was originally three narrow, shallow shopfronts and they were very dark and dingy. I came and had a look and said you must be joking! I couldn't see how it would work but fortunately my wife had the vision!
"They were close to where we live and close to the Wollongong Day Surgery I use and close to Figtree Private Hospital, so the location was ideal. They were for sale and tenanted to three separate businesses, all on a month-to-month basis, so we bought them and then looked for some help with amalgamating them into a single area."
Dr D'Rozario had opened a branch practice in temporary premises in the Sydney suburb of Manly recently and attended the opening of the practice of Drs Roger Hammond and Steve Moate, two of his orthodontic colleagues, in neighbouring Balgowlah.
"Roger and Steve's practice looked great so I asked them who had designed it and they then introduced us to Anne Lev- itch from Levitch Design Associates. We had to move fast as my wife was expecting our third child so we started by sending Anne a Powerpoint presentation by email with photos to expedite the process. We tried to communicate how we like to work and the pros and cons of the site.
"We had firm ideas about what we wanted the practice to be. We'd only finished renovating the previous practice in 2004 so I'd learnt immeasurably from that experience and knew what worked and what didn't.
"An oral and maxillofacial surgery practice is different from a regular dental practice so we provided a lot of input into the design. In the last practice, for example, because there were two of us we thought when we renovated that it would be ideal to include two treatment rooms. However in practice, because we use a day surgery for the majority of our procedures, the second treatment room was rarely ever used.
"The new site was smaller than the previous practice but I also knew we could achieve efficiencies in the design process and also by using new technologies that would save a great deal of space."
For More Information on A Fresh Start For Busy Specialist >>
-205x205.jpg)
