By April, the temporary trailers that have housed Riverside Smithfield Hospital President Jessica Macalino and her staff since the 50-bed facility broke ground in 2023 will be hauled away to make room for final paving and landscaping.

By the end of May, much of the fencing that has surrounded the 30-acre campus will come down, giving an unobstructed view of the hospital from Benns Church Boulevard.

“Things are going to transform in the next two months quite dramatically as we get into the spring,” said senior project manager Russell Parrish, who invited the Times for a March 6 tour.

In fact, one of the challenges going forward will be convincing people that the hospital isn’t open yet, Parrish said. It’s still on track to see its first patients by January.

The exterior will look largely complete by this summer, but there’s still a lot of work to be done on the inside, he said.

Still, it’s a lot further along – both inside and out – than four months ago when the Times last visited the site.

Most of the walls have at least their first coat of paint, either white or sage green. Three staff elevators that weren’t in place in November are now operational. There’s interior lighting and some exterior lighting. Parrish said the final parking lot pole lights will be installed by the end of the month.

The heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system is also operational, which has allowed work to continue throughout the winter amid multiple snowstorms.

“The snow wasn’t too bad,” Parrish said. “It helped us, if anything else, make sure that our windows weren’t leaking, our roofs weren’t leaking.”

The interior is still being finished in phases. The emergency department is the furthest along.

Work has also started on a mix of green, tan and white terrazzo flooring that’s being installed in a wavy pattern that will span the central corridor from the emergency department to the cafeteria. Parrish said the colors were chosen in part to reflect Riverside’s branding and in part to put patients and visitors at ease.

“That’s what you want to do when you come to a hospital is be comfortable,” Parrish said.

Terrazzo is a very durable material that’s often used in schools and is ideal for hospitals, he said.

In the corridor outside the imaging department “you can see they’ve had some fun with some of the ceiling designs, add a little color,” Parrish said. “We’re going to have artwork sprinkled through here toward the end of the project, the very end of the project; we don’t want to get that damaged yet.”

In the emergency department, the nursing stations are now in place, as is the pneumatic tube system that will near-instantaneously transport prescription drugs and blood samples between floors.

“They’ve been dropped in throughout the building to make sure that the scripts can get over to the lab and back,” Parrish said. “We’ve got most of our nurse calls for patient rooms in place. Some of the door frames are in place. We’ve got a little work to do on some floors.”

Immediately to the right of the ambulance entrance is a trauma bay. It’s slightly smaller than the hospital’s four full-size operating rooms and is intended for immediately stabilizing patients. Like the operating rooms, it has an already-in-place ceiling unit capable of suspending booms with medical equipment. It can also change the lighting based on best practices for the particular procedure being performed.

Work has also begun on the helicopter pad that will receive airlifted patients in the most critical condition.

“If it’s that level trauma, whether it’s coming from the helicopter or from (an) ambulance, this is probably where they’re going. … Beyond that it’s either up to surgery if they need or into an imaging area where they get CT scans, X-rays,” Parrish said.

In the hospital’s first-floor utility wing, the smell of molten metal permeated the air as workers welded two boilers into place.

“These two new steam boilers will provide processed steam for sterile processing and building humidity along with our domestic hot water,” said Brian Shotwell, Riverside Smithfield Hospital’s director of facilities.

“Every day that I’m on site there’s something new and something different,” Macalino said.

Come April, Macalino will be moving herself and her staff into the building. While Parrish oversees the construction, Macalino has been working off what she called an occupancy activity schedule that sets key recruitment deadlines needed to meet the expected 2026 opening date. The actual construction will be complete by August or September, Macalino said.

She’s already hired the hospital’s senior leadership team. Dr. Justin Billings, a physician with Riverside since 2019, joined her staff as chief medical officer last summer. Michelle Wooten, another summer 2024 hire, serves as chief nursing officer.

“Now we’re working on our next phase of recruitment – director and management level roles,” Macalino said.

Director- and management-level jobs will be advertised over the next few months to be in place by late summer, she said. Macalino said she expects to begin recruiting nurses around late summer or early fall.

“We’ll be doing a lot of recruitment over the next eight months,” Macalino said.

The occupancy schedule also sets dates for when supply closets need to be stocked and when new employees must complete any required training.

The adjacent Jamison-Longford Medical Building, named for two longtime physicians who helped establish Suffolk’s Western Tidewater Free Clinic, is on track to be complete by late May to early June and open around August, Parrish said. The one-story building will house outpatient physical therapy and specialist services such as gastroenterology, orthopedics, urology and cardiology.

It will open around the same time as the hospital’s offices in the former Rite Aid on Benns Church Boulevard, which Riverside is converting as a primary care and women’s health practice, Macalino said.