The Native Hawaiian Center of Excellence at the University of Hawai'i's John A. Burns School of Medicine will close at the end of April because of a cutback in federal funding for it and other minority centers elsewhere in the country.

Most of the programs are being transferred to the school's Department of Native Hawaiian Health, which could also employ many of the center's former workers. Dr. Benjamin Young, director of the center since 1998, will be retiring. The center was founded in 1991 to help improve the health of Native Hawaiians through research, education and service. It worked with Native Hawaiian students interested in pursuing careers in medicine as well as worked on Native Hawaiian health issues for the school of medicine's curriculum. It also sought to support research into Hawaiian healthcare issues.

University spokesman Gregg Takayama said the center's three remaining full-time workers are being offered positions within the Department of Native Hawaiian Health and that two-part-time workers had already joined the department.

"We think we can minimize the impact of the loss of this program by reallocating resources within the department," said Takayama, who said the school is also discussing whether the center's collection of works by Native Hawaiian authors will be housed within the department or with a library services unit. The Bush administration and Congress have cut back funding for the centers-for-excellence program saying it had a difficult time determining if the programs were accomplishing their goals. The funding had gone to programs serving underrepresented groups in medicine, such as African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. The Native Hawaiian center's federal funding dropped to zero last year from $741,000 in 2005. The medical school cited Young for working tirelessly to increase the number of Native Hawaiians in medicine. His other accomplishments included establishing a fellowship program to increase the number of Native Hawaiian faculty, obtaining funding to support for Hawaiian language medical textbooks and Hawaiian medical history and setting up a database of Native Hawaiian physicians.

Reach Greg Wiles at gwiles@honoluluadvertiser.com.