It’s been nearly six months since The Smithfield Times’ received its first inside look at Riverside Smithfield Hospital on June 5.

The interior of the 50-bed hospital slated to open in early 2026 has since taken shape.

Steel framework is now covered by drywall, providing a much clearer picture of how the roughly 200,000-square-foot, four-story building will be laid out. The Times returned for an updated tour on Nov. 12.

“We’re a little over 50% done with the drywall on this floor and we’re nearly 100% on all the other floors,” said senior project manager Russell Parrish, showing the hospital’s third story, which houses 32 patient rooms.

“There’s a few spaces that are support spaces and a central utility plant that still needs drywall but we’re hitting that milestone pretty quickly,” Parrish said.

One of the patient rooms, intended to be a prototype for the others, has already been partially outfitted with cabinetry and wiring for a wall-mounted television.

The floor is laid out like a race track, Parrish said, with a central nurse’s station.

The floor below contains six labor and delivery patient rooms, pre- and post-surgery bays and the hospital’s operating rooms. The second- and third-floor rooms are equipped with pass-through windows to allow nurses to look in on multiple patients at once from the hallway.

Below on the first floor is the emergency department, imaging zone, lobby and cafeteria.

“We’ve got ceiling grid dropped in, we’ve got some lights energized, soffits are built,” Parrish said. “The layout of where the nurse’s station is going to be on the floor, you can begin to see the outline there. We’re starting these past couple days to install the door frames for each of the individual bays, and then there’s some other miscellaneous systems that are all coming together within the ceiling grid like the sprinkler system, fire alarms, things of that nature.”

The emergency department has its own covered entrance for ambulances and its own “trauma bay.”

“it’s a step down from an operating room,” Parrish said. “You can see we’ve got our specialized ceiling system in here. It’s going to have some booms hanging down from it, special lights we can dim.”

The second-floor operating rooms will also be equipped with special ceiling systems with connections for medical gas and tools.

A network of pneumatic tubes has been installed to carry prescription drugs between floors from the hospital pharmacy.

The imaging department will house mammography and ultrasound scanners.

“Our goal is to move some of our imaging activities that exist in Smithfield already,” Parrish said.

Because the hospital doesn’t yet have its own interior MRI scanner, two bays have been built for mobile MRIs.

The ceilings are lined with temporary heating, ventilation and air-conditioning ductwork to allow temperature-dependent construction activities to continue during the winter months, ensuring mortar will set and glue will dry. There’s also now electricity, but that too is temporary.

“Dominion has brought in power, so we’ve got some things starting to fire up,” Parrish said. “There’s some things that we still have to do to get permanent power.”

Almost all of the windows now have glass, including the four-story feature window at the first-floor and third-floor lobbies at the corner of the L-shaped building.

The only windows without glass have been deliberately left open to hoist materials to the second and third floors. That shouldn’t be necessary once the staff elevators go active in one to two weeks.

“The goal is to have a couple of these elevators live in the next week or week and a half so the rest of the construction can go a little bit faster, we won’t have to worry about stairs, doing everything up and down the stairs,” Parrish said. “Once these three go live we’ll start working on the visitor elevators that are right outside the front entrance.”

Because most of the focus has been on the interior, very little has changed outside since September, save for the ongoing addition of exterior metal wall panels on the fourth-story mechanical floor and the addition of exterior lighting. The metal panels should be finished by the end of the year, Parrish said.

Nov. 12 also marked the start of precast brick panel installation on an adjacent one-story medical office building slated to open in 2025 and house specialist services.

Work is also ongoing in the hospital’s first-floor utility wing.

“This is what we’re going to call the boiler room, we have water treatment, we have medical gas, skids coming in to supply oxygen,” said Brian Shotwell, who was hired as Riverside Smithfield Hospital’s director of facilities three months ago.

The utility plant is supplied by two underground fuel tanks that will allow the hospital to generate its own power if the grid goes down.

“Plenty of redundancy has been built in so once we turn the lights on we’ll never turn them off again,” Shotwell said.