David Borsey was a consultant at Glan Clywd Hospital, Rhyl, north Wales. An experienced physician and diabetologist, he was also a talented and efficient man on committees and was much in demand at local, regional and national level.
He was born the son of a master pork butcher and educated in Manchester. He then studied veterinary medicine at Edinburgh for one year before transferring to medical school. That decision was a loss for the vets and a huge gain for the medics.
After junior medical posts in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dumfermline and Dundee he crossed two borders to be appointed to the new consultant post in general medicine, diabetes and endocrinology at Glan Clwyd Hospital in 1985.
Here he developed a first class service despite being constrained by a lack of funding and staff. The new diabetes and renal centre, due to open shortly after his death, was one of his many projects. He established shared care diabetes schemes, annual screening for diabetes complications, a young adult diabetes clinic and a radio-iodine service. He led a single-handed consultant medical firm and was very busy with increasing numbers of medical emergencies.
In Glan Clwyd Hospital he was chairman of the drugs and therapeutics committee, was a highly successful organiser of postgraduate medical studies and had shortly prior to his death had taken over the duties of clinical director of medicine.
He was a founder member and secretary of the Welsh Endocrine and Diabetes Society and had been honorary secretary of the Society of Physicians in Wales. He was closely involved with the British Diabetic Association, now Diabetes UK, and had spent several holidays at summer camp with young people with diabetes. He was chair of the Welsh committee of the BDA between 1993 and 1996 and also a member of the board of trustees for this period. He served on the professional advisory committee of the BDA between 1996 and 1998 and was then a directly elected medical member of the board of trustees between 1997 and 2000. He was elected a Fellow of both the London and Edinburgh Colleges and had recently been made an examiner of the Edinburgh College.
David was a perfectionist, highly organised and hard working and had a lovely sense of humour. Of great importance was the fact that he was well liked and respected by his patients for his clinical skills and bedside manner and by his colleagues for his straightforward and sensible approach to the everyday challenges of hospital life.
He was always immaculately dressed and took pleasure in driving his sports car and planting unusual trees in his country garden. He enjoyed good food and fine wine and found time, in his busy schedule, to play golf and the piano, both to a high standard.
David was a family man and was immensely proud of his daughters, Gemma and Cisa, and he knew that without his wife's loyal support over many years he would not have been able to achieve everything that he had accomplished.
David died suddenly from a myocardial infarction and his death stunned a community of patients and colleagues in Glan Clwyd and throughout Wales.
D F Child
[Brit.med.J.,2000,321,1024; Proc.R.Coll.Physicians.Edinb.,2001:31:86]