Hard work translates into success at dental practice

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2016 (3365 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

His is the classic immigrant story, he acknowledges. He came from nothing and became something.

Roman Drouchkevitch was well on his way to becoming a dentist in his native country when, he, in his early 20s, was whisked from Ukraine with his parents to Canada. They couldn’t leave in years previous under Soviet Union rule.

He moved to Winnipeg in the early 1990s, where his uncle had settled. He worked in his uncle’s meat shop six days a week, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. He cut meat, tied sausages and hung them up. He was paid no more than minimum wage, $5 at the time.

The thought of trying dentistry crossed his mind but re-training wasn’t feasible. It was expensive, and he figured he should get a few years of work behind him first.

That’s what he did. Drouchkevitch worked for a few years before venturing into part-time studies in physics. He was good at it, began studying full-time, and figured he would turn physics into a career.

But a chance encounter with an old professor from Ukraine guided him to dentistry, a path that led him to opening his first dentistry practice in Steinbach this year.

“It’s been fantastic,” said Drouchkevitch, 47. “It’s a new place so a new place has to be organized in a way that the other office I worked at has been organized. I want to work in a room where I know where everything is. I extend my hand, I can touch what I want with my eyes closed, so I’m trying to do the same thing here.”

Choice Dental Care is located at 175 First Street. A residence once located at the spot was razed last year.

In some ways, Drouchkevitch is returning full-circle to his roots preparing meat: he still works a lot. His new Steinbach clinic is open on Monday, Thursday and Saturday, while he continues working in Morden on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

“The world comes around,” he notes. “I started with six days and I still work six days.”

Case in point: on a recent Monday night, after his last patient walked out, this interview was conducted. An hour later he still had administrative work to finish, their daughter to pick up from their babysitter, and then a drive to Winnipeg. Afterwards, they would cook up dinner far closer to 10 p.m. than most would tolerate.

He would be awake by 6 a.m. to commute to Morden the next day.

It is that commitment to hard work that has brought the Drouchkevitch’s to owning their own clinic.

Roman was in his late 20s, pursuing a physics degree at the University of Winnipeg, when he came across an old dentistry teacher from Ukraine, now studying in the city.

“He says, I remember you as a student,” recalled Drouchkevitch of the conversation with his former teacher. “You can go to any field that you like but you already tried dentistry once, why don’t you try it again? And I thought, ‘Well, that’s probably a good idea.’”

He graduated from the University of Manitoba with a dentistry degree in 2001, and took on stints in dentistry clinics in Dauphin, Ashern, Steinbach and Morden.

He married Nell in 2010, who encouraged him to strike out on his own. He was not fond of handling administrative duties beforehand, but now his wife offered to help.

It took a couple years until they settled on Steinbach. Their clinic, with Nell as co-owner, opened in January.

White and glistening, the complex Choice Dental calls home is state-of-the-art. There is no paper, everything is done electronically. There is a screen in each dental operating room to show patients what work is being done.

Drouchkevitch is the lone dentist in the clinic, which may change, along with the number of days the clinic is open, depending on their success.

He said they are starting off well. They are hoping to cater to non-English speakers, with services also provided in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish, but they aren’t being exclusionary.

“I’ll provide service to anybody who walks through,” he said.