Does anyone still perform manual platelet counts?  We very rarely do them and I am trying to convince my Pathologist that we can discontinue them.  Seems kind of antiquated.

No.

Scott

Curious to know how you're doing them - the unopette was discontinued years ago. 

We do not perform them (despite doctor's best efforts to demand them).

We still order the kits here: "BNP Leukochek"s they are called.  We need them for a check-off item for our students.  (No Eosinophil stains though!)

Scott

do NOT let my NICU know that!!

We stopped doing them when the Unopettes were discontinued. We do a manual smear correlation and make any notations if the platelet estimate seems inconsistent with the analyzer count.

Nope; we correlate high/low platelet counts with smear. If clumping is present, we have a canned comment we drop in advising that platelet clumping was observed and the actual count is probably higher than reported.