Summit County launches Strong Starts home visits for families

Strong Starts is designed to catch family problems early, before they become harder and more expensive to fix. The Summit County Health Department’s new home-visitation effort brings nurses into homes across the Wasatch Back to check on infants, toddlers and elementary-age children, while also looking for the kinds of pressures that can spill into bigger health and school problems.

The program serves children ages 0-8 who are uninsured, underinsured or enrolled in Medicaid, but it is not limited to those categories. Kelsey Fillmore said the department did not want to restrict help only to families who qualify for Medicaid, since many insured households still do not have coverage for this kind of support. That makes Strong Starts as much an access program as a health program in a county where cost, distance and family schedules can make routine preventive care harder to reach than it looks on paper.

In practice, the visits are meant to be comprehensive. Staff typically begin with a general safety check for hazards such as unsecured furniture, exposed plugs and other common risks in the home. They also conduct developmental screenings, physical assessments and mental health support, with a deliberate focus on postpartum depression and anxiety so adults in the home are not overlooked while attention stays on the child.

The county has framed the service around prevention rather than crisis response. Nurses can visit as often or as infrequently as families find helpful, and Summit County Health lists in-home visits on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at its Kamas clinic location. That schedule gives the program a defined weekly window while still leaving room for follow-up visits shaped by each family’s needs.

Strong Starts also fits into a broader public health strategy that has been building for months. Summit County spent 2024 gathering local health data for its community health assessment, then moved into its first community health improvement plan in March, a five-year effort focused on partnerships, nutrition and higher immunization rates. After the county’s first identified measles case in the current nationwide outbreak in January, the case for earlier, home-based outreach became even clearer.