Q1 Review: Is Your Child Still Operational? A Quarterly Business Review

It's that time of year again. Calendars have been cleared. Snack boxes prepared. A carefully colour-coded diary of appointment times has been consulted. We are, once again, entering what I can only describe as the Quarterly Business Review season of parenting a child with additional needs. That two-week window where every single specialist, consultant, and therapist on the planet simultaneously decides it is time to Check In On The Asset.

Audiologist. Physiotherapist. Paediatrician. Ophthalmology. EHCP review. The occasional wildcard, like someone ringing to ask if we've "noticed any changes" since last time, which, yes, actually, a few, but I've only got fifteen minutes in a car park to tell you about them.

It is, frankly, indistinguishable from a board meeting.

There's an agenda. There are action points. Someone asks if the previous action points were completed and the honest answer is: some of them, yes; others, no, because life happened and also I forgot to order that specific piece of equipment for six weeks because it required a form I didn't know existed. I might start going in with slides. (I haven't actually made slides. But I feel like I should have slides).

The format is remarkably consistent across departments. We open with a recap of last quarter's performance, which is a polite way of saying: has he grown, has he regressed, has he done anything unexpected that we should log. There's a round of applause for the wins, which in our case tends to sound like me saying "he's doing really well actually" in a voice that is approximately 40% bravado. Then we move into challenges, risks to monitor, and a forward-looking plan. Someone writes something in a system I will never have access to. We shake hands and agree to reconvene in three to six months.

And then we do it all again. Every quarter. Like clockwork.

The funniest part, if you can call it funny (which I'm choosing to), is that none of these appointments talk to each other. They are separate companies with competing interests who have all decided to hold their AGM in the same fortnight. The audiologist does not know what the physio said. The physio does not know what the paediatrician said. I am, in every meaningful sense, the executive assistant who has read all the briefing documents and is sitting in the middle of the org chart, trying to ensure everyone is aligned on the key deliverables.

The key deliverable being, of course, my son.

Elias, for his part, is completely unbothered by any of this. He treats each appointment with the energy of someone who has just been pulled into yet another meeting that could have been an email. He tolerates the observations, endures the measurements, and then immediately gets on with his actual priorities, which are giggling uncontrollably at some small thing and conducting a thorough investigation into what happens when you roll a ball under the sofa repeatedly.

I respect that. Keep your eyes on what matters.

What I've learned, after years of these reviews, is that there's actually something quietly reassuring about them too, even when they pile up and the diary looks like a corporate hellscape.

Because underneath all the forms and the waiting rooms and the "so, what are your concerns at this stage?", what's actually happening is a room full of people who are, in their own clinical, professional, slightly-too-much-jargon way, invested in how Elias is doing.

That's not nothing. That's actually quite a lot.

So yes. QBR is upon us. The meetings have been scheduled. The questions have been prepared. The snacks for the waiting room have been sourced.

Let's run through the numbers.