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While thousands of women across the country marched in solidarity against woman abuse on Wednesday, a female doctor from Leratong Hospital in Krugersdorp was told to "shut up" and she was threatened with death.
"Shut up, I don't speak to women. Who do you think you are?" she was told.
According to Dr Masego Sethlodi, the incident happened before 19:00 on Wednesday.
The incident occurred after a three-year-old was brought into the hospital's trauma and emergency unit, following a motor vehicle accident in the afternoon.
The child was seen by a doctor, taken for a scan and sent back to the emergency unit.
"Apparently the patient's father had been there since 14:00. The child hit his head and a scan was done. There was a delay in the results."
A nurse repeatedly told the man that they were still waiting for the results.
She said the man told the nurse "since you [are] just a mere junior, go and call someone more superior to you".
The father had also demanded that his child be taken to a different health facility.
The hospital's CEO Grey Dube said the man was taken to the offices of the matron, where he was told that the child could not be released before observation of 24 hours because of the head injury.
Sethlodi said she had also tried her best to calm the father down but instead, she was aggressively told to "shut up".
"He told me to shut up and asked me: 'Who do you think you are?' You must just shut up or otherwise, you won't leave this hospital. One family member also threatened me that he will shoot me and that they will be waiting for me."
The man later stormed out of the hospital.
Security officers tried to prevent him from leaving, but he also used a car to block the entrances of the hospital.
The man was given a refusal of health (RHT) form and left with his child.
Sethlodi said she feared for her life and felt unprotected at the hospital.
"Every figure that I saw who passed me where I was stationed, I had to look to see if it was him or not. I was quite scared that he or his family member would come back and finish me off like they had been saying in the video."
When asked how she felt after the ordeal, Sethlodi said: "I am still quite emotional about it and filled with so much anger that in this day and age [there] are so many killings around females and females are not being treated in a manner that they should."
Sethlodi has called on the Department of Health to not protect only female doctors, but all doctors.
"When patients have [a] dispute against the system...we get called in and interrogated. It has turned into a vicious cycle where doctors are now being abused and patients are always right even when they are wrong."
"Doctors just need to forget that they are human and that they have feelings. I just think they (the government) must send out a strong message to say: 'Yes, we are behind our doctors and we will not condone such behaviour'."
Dube said three security guards had been allocated to the emergency unit since.
"There are plans to increase this number. A backup is always called when needed. If an event where an incident is above our capacity, the South African Police Service [is] called," Dube said.
