Conquest hospital staff are raking in up to an extra £100 a day by helping out after an administration blunder.
Information on 2007 patients' ethnic minority was not collected last year, and staff at the hospital have been asked to come in on Saturdays to catch-up.
Those who help out can earn up to 40p per phone call to patients -money being paid by Hastin
gs and Rother Primary Care Trust.
A spokesman for East Sussex Hosptals Trust, which runs the hospital, said: "The trust is undertaking a data-collection exercise to ensure it has all the relevant information about patients who have been admitted to one of our hospitals during 2007.
"This includes ethnicity data required by the government to be used to help the NHS shape local services to meet the needs of the population.
"In the past this information was not always captured. This is a one-off exercise to bring our records up-to-date.
"This data will now be captured on admission as a matter of course.
"This exercise has been undertaken outside normal office hours to increase the likelihood of making contact with patients.
"We have limited the cost of the exercise as far as possible, by using NHS staff."
Hastings and Rye conservative parliamentary candidate Amber Rudd said: "This is a typical government target driven activity; what we need is money spent on front-line services – on nurses, doctors, and cleaning, not on catching up on politically correct information that may help with ticking boxes for getting foundation status but are hardly going to help the patients themselves and the community at large."
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