It’s Sunday morning, a week before before Christmas, and I’m sat among a congregation of people listening to the music that’s playing gently. I look around and see mostly elderly people who are sitting, socially distanced, a couple of metres from each other, in one hand the pamphlets they were given upon arrival and in the other hand a small kitchen timer set for fifteen minutes. I am not, as you might have guessed, in a church service. I am in a local health centre being given the first of my two COVID-19 vaccinations.

The day before had come the news that Tier 4 had engulfed much of the nation and thus Christmas was cancelled, so this was the closest that any of us would get to a festive party. As if to compensate, the surgery staff were all in Christmas jumpers and Santa hats, which contributed to a bit of a Blitz Spirit as we all tried to make the most of queuing in the rain to then be stabbed in the arm.

The whole thing gave me mixed emotions. I was proud that our health service was one of the first so far advanced with vaccinations, yet disappointed that I was there simply because a personal contact had called me and offered to book in my pharmacy staff as a favour, not because pharmacy was high on the list of health professionals to get the jab.

It would have been churlish to decline the offer or criticise the mechanism by which my staff and I received vaccinations. Yet it felt that pharmacy was once again being overlooked despite the huge progress made by our very proactive and effective Local Pharmaceutical Committee.

Whether support with cash-flow, access to full summary care records, or COVID-19 death-in-service benefits, it seems all the national challenges are reflected in a local struggle for pharmacy to receive the same acknowledgement and inclusion as key workers in hospitals and GP practices. Once we’re at the party, none of the other healthcare professions want us to leave, but our usual problem of getting invited in the first place has to be down us.

We can’t blame our national negotiators alone because, as C+D’s editor Beth Kennedy rightly points out in her editorial Queen’s Speech, there is a central five-year ambition for us to play a greater role in patient care. The NHS wants us to provide ever more clinical services, and when we’re given the opportunity to provide consultation and vaccination services, we generally knock it out the park by exceeding patient satisfaction targets and over perform in delivery, so we must take some responsibility on a local level and get involved.

As a profession, we are not naturally imbued with the interpersonal ability that facilitates networking or consultation skills that are so important for commissioning and providing our new services, particularly at the level of Primary Care Networks (PCNs).

If we do nothing else in the New Year, we all need to be heavily involved with our PCNs, otherwise vaccination won’t be the only thing we’ll be in danger of missing out on.

A long-running C+D contributor, the identity of Xrayser remains a mystery, but his irreverent views are known by all. Tweet him @Xrayser