Londoners will be living two years longer by 2012, the city's most senior NHS official has said.

Ruth Carnall, chief executive of NHS London, claimed improvements to the health service will help increase life expectancy to over 83 for women and 78.5 for men.

Health bosses also plan to attract more GPs and move hospital doctors and nurses into the community. Within five years there will be a "major shift" of NHS staff off wards and into local clinics.

A new plan for the city says: "Average life expectancy of Londoners [must be] increased by at least two years for males and females." London has some of the most dramatic life expectancy gaps in the country, with people in Kensington and Chelsea living for an average of 83 years compared with less than 75 in Islington.

However, critics today accused the health authority of making cheap promises. Professor Alan Maryon-Davis, head of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine, said: "Life expectancy is a blunt instrument to measure health. It is also rising every year anyway as a result of changes that people made to their lives decades ago.

"I would be more concerned with the expectancy of people with cardiovascular disease and cancers."

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