Development and inter-rater reliability of a tool assessing hypnotic communication behaviours adopted by nurses caring for children with cancer: The Sainte-Justine Hypnotic Communication Assessment Scale

•The objective is to develop a scale to code for professionals’ behaviours when they are using hypnotic communication to deal with pediatric pain.•We used an iterative process to assess clarity and understandability of items on a subset of video encounters.•The final version of the scale comprises 11 items dealing with rapport and technical skills.•The inter-rater reliability of the scale was excellent.•The results support future systematic analysis of the validity of the scale and is encouraging as for its use to measure communication behaviours following training.