Doctors being offered £1,350 per shift for out-of-hours cover As out of hours firms are paid by the NHS, the money being offered to doctors effectively is funded by taxpayers. Campaigners last night condemned the arrangements as a waste of public funds which put patients at risk. Matthew Sinclair, of the TaxPayers" Alliance, said: "Not only does this place a huge burden on the NHS and taxpayers, excessive pay could encourage staff to work though the night regardless of their circumstances." In documents seen by the Daily Mail it is claimed GPs are being offered £150 for a nine hour shift and bonuses of £1,000 for referring a friend to work for Harmoni. A memo sent last year by a senior manager working for Harmoni reportedly reads: "I would remind you that there remains a £1,000 bonus fee for staff who successfully introduce a colleague to the service." Another email reportedly asked GPs to provide cover for shifts that started just two hours later. Referring to doctors" hourly pay rates, a spokesman for Harmoni said: "We pay market rates which are appropriate for the day and time of shift being offered." Mr Hunt, who is overseeing a review of how out-of-hours services can be improved, said it was a "historic mistake" to remove responsibility for the system from GPs. He said: "Not because family doctors should necessarily go back to being on-call in evenings and weekends; they work hard, they have families and they need a life too. But when responsibility for those services moved outside the GP practice, the personal accountability for 24/7 access to general practice the personal accountability for 24/7 access to general practice was destroyed. Reports yesterday suggested Harmoni was using just one advanced nurse practitioner to cover up to 250,000 patients overnight in one county. A whistleblower claimed that locum doctors have been flown in on easy Jet flights from Europe, or have had to drive long distances to work back-to-back shifts for Harmoni. It was also claimed terminally ill cancer patients had to wait eight hours for a doctor to visit them to give them pain relief. The disclosures come amid concern that an extra four million patients are flooding A&E units each year due to insufficient out-of-hours services.