There is increasing emphasis within healthcare on the use of preventive medicine rather than reactive strategies and treatments. Such strategies deliver enhanced healthcare in a more effective and cost effective manner. Point-of-care screening diagnostics provide the essential basis for this to be delivered. A major opportunity to deliver this preventative medicine requirement is via the wider use of hand held sensing instruments. Such instruments allow ordinary medical staff, or even untrained personnel, to carry out rapid tests for infection at the initial consultation stage, which formerly would have required costly laboratory analysis and incurred significant time delay. In addition, transportable point of care diagnostics permit screening to be carried out in locations remote from conventional pathology laboratory and healthcare facilities. This enables the monitoring of treatment strategies in the field plus more rigorous implementation.