Patrick grew up in New Plymouth and attended Victoria University where he gained a BA with honours. After finishing his politics degree, he studied journalism at Auckland University of Technology.

Patrick started his journalism career working the graveyard shift at The New Zealand Herald, becoming one of the newspaper's two police reporters. He subsequently moved to the UK and worked at Jane's Police Review. Once back in New Zealand, he worked again at the Herald, covering politics. Later he moved to television journalism and began working at 3 News, where he was initially a political reporter. He took over as political editor of 3 News in 2012. In 2018 he shifted roles to become Newshub's national correspondent.

In 2019, Patrick featured in a two-part documentary series Patrick Gower: On Weed, where he explored medicinal and recreational cannabis issues in advance of the 2020 New Zealand cannabis referendum.