Dr Patel's main research interest is in pharmaco-epidemiology for psychiatry and particularly for antipsychotic medication. Dr Patel has worked as a co-investigator on the randomised controlled clinical trials and naturalistic clinical effectiveness studies for risperidone long-acting injection (RLAI). For her MD thesis, she conducted studies investigating attitudes and beliefs to depots of psychiatric nurses and psychiatrists, in London, Manchester and Hong Kong and a cross-sectional study of 222 patients in London which investigated patient attitudes to oral and depot antipsychotic medication. In part, this work was funded as a fellowship by the Medical Research Council (2002-2005). She then held a clinical lecturer position (2005-2010) and continued conducting observational outcome studies and attitudinal studies. She was also a Consultant Psychiatrist working on an acute female in-patient ward at the Bethlem Hospital (2007-2010). More recently, she has developed new lines of research which include exploration of the use of drug plasma levels for antipsychotics in routine clinical practice. She is a co-author for a series of systematic reviews on drug plasma level research for second generation antipsychotics. She has also received funding from the NIHR, in the form of a prestigious Clinician Scientist fellowship, to evaluate use of antipsychotic plasma levels. She has also conducted an investigation of medication prescribing in a systematic sample of all adults commenced on community treatment orders with one year follow up to explore clinical outcomes. Dr Patel's research interests also include insight and treatment adherence in schizophrenia.