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Vital Conditions
for Health and
Well-Being

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Why do some populations thrive and prosper while others struggle and suffer? The Vital Conditions for Health and Well-Being is a framework that addresses this question in a way that is at once understandable, relatable, and actionable.

Simply put, vital conditions are the properties of places and institutions that we all need all the time to reach our full potential. They include physical necessities like food, water, and humane housing, but also include things that are harder to quantify, like a sense of belonging and agency or civic muscle. Investments in these conditions are necessary to create an equitable, thriving future for ourselves and for generations to come.

A man with a beard and a little boy on his shoulders.
A woman in a wheelchair with a child drawing on a easel.
An older man sitting on a bench holding a cane.
A family is running in a park with a city in the background.

Origins of the Vital Conditions 

Over time, different frameworks have attempted to explain the factors that affect a population’s ability to thrive. Some of these frameworks have been greatly influential in shaping our understanding of the ecosystem that produces health and well-being—most notably the social determinants of health framework. The vital conditions are not meant to replace previous frameworks, but rather refine and “evolve” them into a more useful guide for creating measurable systems change.

The concept of vital conditions traces its origin to the Institute of Medicine’s 1988 report The Future of Public Health: “Public health is what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions in which all people can be healthy.”

This statement was an important step forward in our understanding of public health. Specifically, it suggests that public health is best influenced not by direct means (like building more hospitals), but through the indirect means of identifying and improving the underlying conditions that affect health and well-being.

The challenge since then has been to define exactly what these vital conditions are. In 2017, a team led by ReThink Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation came together to fully describe the conditions that are essential to health and well-being. The team sought to build on the social determinants of health by creating a structure that was both comprehensive and succinct.

They aimed to meet the following standards:

  • The conditions should reflect widely held norms and expectations
  • The language should be simple and easy to understand
  • Each condition should align with available measures
  • It should be apparent that each condition is integrally related to the others
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How are the vital conditions different from previous models?

The vital conditions are an evolution, not a replacement, of the social determinants model that has been prevalent since its emergence in the early 2000s.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines the social determinants of health as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.”

  • This framework has greatly enriched our understanding of the non-medical factors that contribute to health and well-being. However, as the WHO and others worked to specify exactly what these social determinants are, the result was a proliferation of lists that attempted to catalog all of the factors that influence health and well-being
  • This complexity creates some significant limitations. New and prospective stewards (not to mention the general public) are often overwhelmed by the abundance of information. Additionally, with so many different lists and a seemingly endless number of proposed determinants, it can be difficult to build consensus and align around specific courses of action.
  • The vital conditions framework focuses on building consensus around a relatively short list of easily understood and easily relatable factors. Stewards now have a model that is much easier to communicate and that facilitates the creation of effective and measurable plans of action.

Vital Conditions vs. Urgent Services

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The vital conditions framework enables several important shifts in the way that people think about health and well-being. One of the most important is recognizing the shortcomings of over-reliance on urgent services.

Urgent services are broadly defined as all of the services that anyone under adversity would need to temporarily regain or restore their health and well-being. These include everything from urgent care clinics to food pantries and homeless shelters.

Urgent services are necessary for a safe, healthy, and thriving community. However, existing ways of thinking about health and well-being often lead to over-investing in urgent services and under-investing in vital conditions.

This creates a negative cycle in which the lack of vital conditions creates excess demand for and reliance on these urgent services. Community leaders and institutions in turn often become hyper-focused on providing more urgent services to meet the demand. It is easy to see how this cycle can perpetuate an over-emphasis on urgent services and obscure the need for identifying and improving root causes.

The truth is that no amount of urgent services can ever produce thriving. The vital conditions model provides a framework for communities to break out of this negative cycle and create a better system that supports thriving for all.

A man with a beard and a little boy on his shoulders.
An older woman and a young girl looking out a window.
A man with dreadlocks standing on a street.
A woman in a wheelchair reading a book.
A group of people holding hands on a couch.

What is a Well-Being Portfolio?

The importance of vital conditions becomes even easier to see when combined alongside urgent services in a full well-being portfolio. In times of crisis, urgent services are lifesaving and life-altering. But urgent services cannot produce the experience of thriving. The path to thriving goes through vital conditions. They shape the choices, opportunities, and challenges that we encounter throughout our lives, from birth to death and across generations.

When vital conditions are disrupted or denied, people struggle and suffer, driving demand for urgent services, which in turn diverts even more resources from vital conditions. The best way to escape this downward spiral is through a balanced portfolio of investments in both vital conditions and urgent services.

When stewards from all walks of life are able to negotiate investment priorities across the well-being portfolio, the experience reliably opens space for honest exchange about the legacies we want to pass on to future generations and what it takes for everyone to thrive together—no exceptions.

Explore More Resources

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Explore the Federal Plan organized around the Vital Conditions framework

In November 2022, the federal government released its landmark interagency plan for Equitable Long-Term Recovery and Resilience that orients federal action around vital conditions, with coordination among more than 44 federal agencies.

Read detailed definitions of the vital conditions and urgent services

Discover why organizing around vital conditions moves the social determinants agenda into wider action

Watch a ReThink Health Toolbox Webinar about the Vital Conditions

Explore additional resources and connect with fellow stewards through: