Brendan Devlin pioneered the use of surgical audit in the UK. He was born in Lancashire on 17 December 1932, the son of John Devlin OBE, a general practitioner from Leix in Ireland, who acted as the local orthopaedic surgeon during the war and was active in medical politics. His mother was Kathleen Maxey from Cork. Brendan claimed he had inherited his red hair and politics from his father and the Protestant work ethic from his mother. His early life was spent between Waterford with his grandfather and Lancashire. Educated by the Christian Brothers in Ireland and at Cotton College, he went to Trinity College Dublin, where he played rugby and sailed. He was always interested in politics and did a BA in public administration and political science, before entering medicine. He qualified with honours and the Haughton and William Halloran Bennet prizes in surgery. In 1958 he married a fellow medical student, Ann Heatley. After his house jobs he demonstrated in anatomy, became surgical registrar at Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital and gained the first of his many surgical fellowships. After a skirmish with orthopaedics in Liverpool, Devlin went to St Thomas's Hospital as a registrar, and then won an MRC fellowship to J B Kinmonth's unit, where his experimental study into intralymphatic radiotherapy gained him the MCh. He was then senior registrar on a rotation, which took him to Portsmouth to do urology with Wiggins-Davies and to St Mark's under Lockhart Mummery, whom he greatly admired. Winning two bursaries enabled him to visit the USA on two occasions to study gastrointestinal surgery. Meanwhile he kept up his interest in politics and sociology by studying courses at the King's Fund and the department of social medicine at St Thomas's. When he was appointed to Stockton in 1970 the hospital was run down and morale was low. At his first prostatectomy, Devlin insisted on cytoscoping the patient. It seems that this (the current practice) was unheard of in Stockton. He was told that there was no cytoscope. Brendan bristled. After a sullen search one was discovered, in its unopened mahogany box labelled 'A gift from the Canadian Red Cross 1940'. Four years later, he found himself busy commissioning the new North Tees General Hospital, which he was determined to put on the surgical map. This he did, by his reputation as a teacher (all his juniors got the Fellowship) and by his publications, which always dealt with everyday conditions affecting large numbers of people, who were sometimes not as well treated as they could and should have been. This made him very angry. In those days a key example was colostomy. Patients with colostomies were sent home with minimal advice or after care. This scandal drove Brendan to try to improve matters. In turn he found himself Chairman of the British Standards Institution Committee on Stoma Appliances and the British Colostomy Society. Anger that hernias were so often being repaired by partially trained juniors using techniques that had been proven to be inadequate led him to set up a multi-centre audit of hernia surgery. This generated guidelines, innumerable publications and a classic textbook of which the second edition appeared just before his death. In 1982, together with John Lunn, who, with Mushin, had previously published a confidential enquiry on anaesthetic deaths, Devlin set up the Confidential Enquiry into Perioperative Deaths (CEPOD). To identify which, if any, post-operative deaths might have been avoided it was essential to get accurate data. This could only be provided by the consultants themselves. This meant stomping the country in order to explain the objectives, to secure their cooperation and to promise confidentiality. Without this protection the data would have been censored, and therefore useless. As might be expected, the first CEPOD report in 1987 showed that perioperative deaths were usually because the underlying condition was fatal. Usually - not always. CEPOD drew attention to occasions when emergencies had been treated by less than completely trained surgeons and anaesthetists without any supervision. It caused a furore. Devlin and Lunn were undeterred and, now with Government support and funding, they pressed on. The study became a national one (NCEPOD). The annual report drew attention to preventable causes of perioperative deaths - the lack of intensive therapy beds, evidence that children with emergency conditions fared better in specialised units and that emergency operations were done out of hours, not because patients were admitted in the night, but for want of staff and resources in the daytime. Often the defects were put right as soon as attention was focused on them. But this was not enough for Brendan. He knew that the process of audit had to expand, and sooner or later must address the performance of individual surgeons. He was elected to the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1986. There he set up and chaired the clinical audit and quality assurance committee. Brendan had gifts of oratory and persuasion. He had considerable charm and nearly unfailing courtesy, though he was not beyond a sharp put-down when he thought it deserved. His intelligence was backed up by hard work, wide reading, an unusual memory and, above all, a passionate concern for the underdog, for the trainee who was being exploited, for the patient who was getting second-best. His enthusiasm for teaching, and his wide experience on the Court of Examiners had made Brendan very critical of the existing system. When in time he became Chairman of the examination committee he was active in bringing about the long-overdue reforms of the FRCS. To those for whom any change is always seen as a threat, Brendan was a threatening figure. Brendan Devlin travelled widely to examine and to give lectures. He gave the Arris and Gale lecture in 1970, the Bradshaw lecture and oration in 1996, and the Hunterian oration in 1997. He was a member of many distinguished societies and on the editorial board of many prestigious surgical journals. He was appointed CBE in 1994. After his retirement he continued to work for the King's Fund on the commission of medical services in London and their organisational audit council. About two years before his death his health began to deteriorate. First came a series of cerebro-vascular episodes, which left his speech slurred. Then came a catastrophic haematuria, which disclosed a renal carcinoma whose metastases led to his death on Boxing Day 1998. He was only 66. He was survived by his widow Ann Elizabeth Heatley JP and four sons, Tim, James, Peter and Brendan, none of whom followed him into medicine.