Construction at Riverside Smithfield Hospital is on track to be complete in just under a year.

Hospital President Jessica Macalino, in a Sept. 24 interview with The Smithfield Times, said she anticipates that the hospital will receive its certificate of occupancy from Isle of Wight County by next August or September.

The remaining three or four months of 2025, following the certificate’s issuance, would be devoted to testing the 50-bed hospital’s equipment and training staff ahead of a planned opening in early 2026, Macalino said.

The Times has been meeting quarterly with Macalino since the hospital’s July 26, 2023, groundbreaking to keep the community informed on construction progress. In 14 months, the 30-acre campus has seen a rapid transformation, with much visible progress having occurred this year.

Brasfield & Gorrie LLC, the hospital’s Alabama-based contractor, began erecting steel beams in February and completed the framework by June, prompting Riverside to host a beam-signing ceremony where Macalino and community representatives affixed their signatures to the final beam before it was hoisted by crane into place. By August, the hospital’s brick and concrete exterior was nearly complete and its first few glass windows had been installed.

Now “we have basically completed pretty much all of the window installation,” Macalino said.

A few window spaces have been left without glass to facilitate the delivery of equipment to the four floors, Macalino said. Patient rooms will be on the second and third floors with the fourth reserved for mechanical equipment.

The completed work includes the four-story glass feature window that forms the corner of the L-shaped building near its entrance.

The hospital construction is now entering its interior phase, where visible progress won’t be as apparent from the street, Macalino said. Some areas of the interior are further along than others.

The first-floor emergency department already has drywall up and some areas even have paint, Macalino said. Other areas, such as the third floor patient rooms, still have exposed metal stud walls.

Meanwhile, progress continues on the adjacent one-story Jamison-Longford medical office, which will house outpatient physical therapy and specialist services. Since June, when contractor W.M. Jordan laid the foundation for the 27,000-square-foot building, construction crews have largely completed the steel framing of its exterior and have begun work on interior metal stud walls.

Macalino said the next steps are to integrate utilities and install the roof.

Dr. Justin Billings and Michelle Wooten joined Macalino in her Sept. 24 call with the Times. Riverside hired Billings in July as the hospital’s first chief medical officer and Wooten as its chief nursing officer.

Both were hired internally. Billings, since his hiring, has been dividing his time between his new role and his current position as associate medical director and hospitalist at Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News. The same is true for Wooten, who’s currently chief nursing officer of Riverside Doctors Hospital in Williamsburg.

Billings said his role as CMO for Riverside Smithfield has centered around recruiting other physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners and overseeing the new hires’ onboarding.

“We’ve done some on-site interviews already,” Billings said.

The onboarding process includes ensuring new hires who applied directly after completing their residencies have obtained their federal Drug Enforcement Administration licenses, that any out-of-state hires have Virginia licenses, and credentialing new hires with Riverside by performing background checks and interviewing references, all of which can take several months, Billings said.

Wooten said she’s been focusing on staffing plans and developing policies and procedures for Riverside Smithfield. She plans to transfer to full-time status as CNO of Riverside Smithfield in 2025.

Macalino said the next milestone that will be visible from the street is completion of the Jamison-Longford medical office by mid-2025, with a possible opening by late summer.

Around the same time the medical office opens, Macalino said, Riverside will open a primary care facility on Benns Church Boulevard in the former Smithfield Rite Aid, which closed in January as one of 17 stores across Hampton Roads impacted by Rite Aid’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 12:07 p.m. on Sept. 27 to correct that W.M. Jordan, not Brasfield & Gorrie, is building the one-story medical office.